My good friend, and general cycling expert, Cosmo recently tweeted about what he perceived as more GC (overall ranking) shakeups taking place in Tour de France stages with a downhill finish as opposed to uphill, mountaintop, finishes. Â He then followed that up with a comment to that effect, linking back to my bumps chart as […]
Tagged Analysis, cycling, technical, tour de franceTake that vector graphics animation! For an explanation, see my previous effort. Reminder: This should work in Chrome, Firefox and Safari. But consider it experimental. Reloading the page should restart the animation. I confirmed that this won’t work in Firefox, and that the one SVG plugin for Firefox has been discontinued by Adobe (although apparently […]
Tagged animation, cycling, tour de franceI’ve fussed in the past about the weaknesses of FIS points in distance events, but they really are quite useful. Â Sprint events, however, just don’t have an equivalently simple and useful numerical summary. Â I’ve resorted to using the final finishing rank (i.e. what place you came in, after the elimination rounds), but I’ve never been […]
Tagged Analysis, Athlete Ranking, Sprint, technicalNow that I have some athlete similarity code up and running, let’s take it for a spin, shall we? The basic idea is to pick a skier (Beckie Scott in this case) and then mine my results database for skiers who’ve had similar careers. Â This is a fairly complicated task with a lot of steps. […]
Tagged athlete similarity, beckie scott, Distance, SprintThis idea comes from a similar sort of game that baseball stat heads play. Â The idea is to match up similar athletes based upon their performances. Â In baseball, we’d look at a whole slew of statistics for some current player’s career and then scan through the historical records and find other players who had similar […]
Tagged Analysis, athlete similarity, DistanceWatching Devon Kershaw’s (CAN) amazing race in the Olympic 50k this past season was both thrilling and a bit heartbreaking. Â There’s something of a reality distortion field that takes hold when the Olympics roll around that elevate the top three positions in a cross-country race to near mythic levels. This is at least slightly bizarre, […]
Tagged devon kershaw, Distance, podiumLast week I ranted a bit about the inadequacies of F-factors[1. The scaling factor FIS uses to adjust FIS points depending on whether the race was an interval or mass start.]. Â We looked at the results from interval vs. mass start races and determined that they do indeed produce different distributions of percent back’s (PB’s). […]
Tagged Athlete Ranking, Distance, eqpb, fis points, mass start