The concept of a “hot hand” is a popular one in various sports, and has been variously bunked, debunked and rebunked in numerous contexts. Â A common manifestation of this idea comes from basketball, where fans routinely feel that players will get “hot” during a stretch of a game during which they make a much higher […]
Tagged accuracy, biathlon, hot hand, shootingWith Marit Bjørgen (and only a handful of others) dominating the women’s WC circuit last season, I thought I’d check out how this compared to past seasons. I took all WC, OWG, WSC and TDS races for each season and counted the number of distinct skiers finishing at four different levels: 1st, top 3, top […]
Tagged competitiveness, World CupWith the modern chip timing tools used today ties should be fairly rare. They do still happen, though: This shows the number of ties per race of each type for WC, OWG, WSC and TDS races for men and women. As we might have expected, there are considerably fewer ties in mass start style races. […]
Tagged ties, World CupThe obvious follow-up from the last entry in this series is to look at the folks who have the strongest tendency to fall further behind the leaders as the race progresses. Not surprisingly, this group will include a lot of the more marginal skiers from smaller skiing nations. I did filter out people for whom […]
Tagged split times, World CupContinuing with my series of posts looking at some split time data (kindly provided by Jan at WorldOfXC.com), we turn to identifying some folks who tend to ski better (as measured by their % behind the leaders) towards the end of a race than the beginning. I actually fit a model on this one (gasp!) […]
Tagged split times, splits, World CupA very brief note appeared on FasterSkier the other day noting that Canadian Dasha Gaiazova has apparently been removed from the World Cup team. No one would comment because apparently an appeal is underway, so I don’t imagine we’ll hear much about it until that process has played itself out. My impression has been that […]
Tagged canada, daria gaiazova, team selectionEarlier this week I looked at the split times for some individual US and Canadian WC skiers. Today, let’s back up a bit a get a bit of a bird’s eye view. (Dont worry, I’ll look at some other top WC skiers in more detail in subsequent posts.) The following graph shows all the split […]
Tagged men, split times, women, World Cup