Can’t leave out the poor biathletes, now can we? Â Biathlon doesn’t have a point system like FIS points, so these will all be using raw percent back. Â If you’re familiar with these sorts of measures, you’ll notice that percent backs in biathlon are frequently quite a bit higher. For a variety of reasons, it’s harder […]
Tagged biathlon, race snapshot, women, World CupNow let’s turn to the US women biathletes. Â The women haven’t managed to produce any results comparable to Tim Burke’s recent success, but there are a ton of young skiers it seems trying to change that. Â I’ve noticed a lot of collegiate cross country skiers switching over (or maybe back) to biathlon after graduated, and […]
Tagged biathlon, haley johnson, lanny barnes, laura spector, sara studebaker, season preview, usstMarit Bjørgen commented somewhere that her win at the WC opener in Gällivare, SWE was “the best skate race of her life”.  Sadly, I can’t find where I read that, otherwise I’d have a link for you.  Obviously, I found that kind of intriguing.  Let’s look at Bjørgen’s race in a bit more detail: This […]
Tagged freestyle, margin of victory, marit bjoergenMy previews for the US biathlon teams will be briefer, which reflects the fact that I know less about the US biathlon team, and biathlon in general. Â Feel free to correct me in the comments if I get anything horribly wrong. Â For example, I’m going to take a very simplistic approach to who’s actually on […]
Tagged biathlon, jay hakkinen, jeremy teela, lowell bailey, season preview, tim burke, usstAs always, there’s lots of stuff I could focus on, but we can’t have everything. Â As is usually the case, the weekend was a bit of a mixed bag for the North Americans. Â Kris Freeman continued to look quite strong despite some bad luck with his poles. Â Alex Harvey and Devon Kershaw had much stronger […]
Tagged kikkan randall, kuusamo, liz stephen, morgan arritola, recap, World CupThis recap of this past weekend’s WC races will be a little different than before. Â Rather than focus on individual performances, I’d like to look at the races as a group. Â Stage race formats are relatively new to the cross country world, and these short stage races are even newer. Â Since they are roughly modeled […]
Tagged bump chart, kuusamo, recap, stage raceUse some caution interpreting these, due to the unusual race circumstances today. Â These graphs apply only to today’s freestyle portion of the Kuusamo races, and each skier’s percent back (and hence their FIS points) can be influenced by the race tactics on the course, since we were dealing with a pursuit-style start and people were […]
Tagged Distance, kuusamo, race snapshot