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{ Category Archives } Cross Country

Head-to-Head: Mika Myllylae vs. Thomas Alsgaard

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but with Mika Myllylae in the news recently I thought this might be fun… This head-to-head matchup might not be the first you’d think of to look at, but you end up with an interesting graph nonetheless.  As always, I grabbed the 54 races where Myllylae […]

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Competitiveness Trends

With 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 […]

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How Often Do Ties Occur?

With 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. […]

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FIS Point Trends In Olympic Medalists

A while back I responded to a reader requesting that I look into any connections between a skier’s performance at World Juniors and subsequent medal winning.  My conclusions there tended toward the ambiguous, since 2-4 races (from World Juniors) just isn’t a whole lot of information. But we can also just take medalists and look […]

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WC Split Times: Biggest Losses

The 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 […]

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WC Split Times: Biggest Gains

Continuing 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!) […]

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Dasha Gaiazova Off Canadian WC Team?

A 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 […]

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