I happened to be thinking about visualizations of athlete development recently, and in the process cooked up the following graph: What I’ve done here is to take the podium finishers in major international events for the past five seasons and recorded each person’s age when they received their first (individual) WC/OWG/WSC start, when they scored […]
Tagged development, Distance, men, Sprint, women, World CupA curious report surfaced a while back that included some doping allegations around Juha Mieto and Manuela Di Centa. I can’t say that I’d ever heard any rumors about either skier in the past. As with every other post I’ve done on a skier accused of doping, this look at their results data isn’t meant […]
Tagged doping, manuela di centa, World CupThis post is somewhat of a teaser trailer for the sorts of things we can do once we have a complete record of major international ski results stretching back to the 70’s. A natural and possibly controversial question is whether the World Cup field has become more or less competitive over time. Â Intuitively, I think […]
Tagged classic, history, interval start, men, World CupContinuing on from last time, we’ll single out a handful of skiers who appear to do significantly better in shorter sprint courses. Same methodology as before led me to pluck out the following three skiers: In general, the effects in this direction tended to be weaker and less dramatic, even at the extreme ends of […]
Tagged Analysis, caroline weibel, course length, maurice manificat, Sprint, timo simonlatser, World CupThe notion of an athlete preferring distance races of a particular length is pretty familiar, but what about sprinting? The differences between a 0.8km and a 1.8km sprint course may not seem like much compared to the differences between a 15km and 30km race. But (while I’m not a physiology expert) it seems likely to […]
Tagged Analysis, holly brooks, jeori kindschi, petra majdic, Sprint, valentina novikova, World CupThat’s an easy one: probably not. I’m referring, of course, to his recent pronouncements about the upcoming season, in which he claims that he will win 7 World Cups, the Tour de Ski overall title, as well as 3 golds at World Championships. Obviously, given Northug’s history I’m not inclined to take this too seriously. […]
Tagged idle speculation, petter northug, World CupLiz Stephen destroyed the women’s field this weekend in the annual Climb to the Castle rollerski race. The margin, just over 5 minutes in a race that took the leaders between 40-45 minutes is certainly impressive. But I think that margin doesn’t provide much useful information. Time trials that are most useful as gauges of […]
Tagged climb to the castle, ida sargent, jessie diggins, liz stephen, pre season, roller skiing, time trial