Finnish sprinter Pirjo Muranen is one of several skiers hanging up their skis for good this year. I’ll be devoting a post to each of them over the next few Fridays, but first the Finnish sprinter. Muranen was certainly a successful skier, though not an overpowering one. She has an individual Gold and Bronze from […]
Tagged finland, pirjo muranen, retrospective, skier retirementWith somewhat cryptic reports appearing that Andrus Veerpalu failed a drug test back in January (he retired just before World Championships this year), it’s probably a good idea to revisit my old post on the subject. In that post I considered the conventional wisdom about Veerpalu that he had an uncanny ability to pop outstanding […]
Tagged andrus veerpalu, dopingNo joke! Seriously, though, I thought about writing an April Fool’s post and then realized that I kind of hate April Fool’s posts. Probably because I’m an über-boring statistics geek who doesn’t know how to have fun at all. Or something. Winter’s ending elsewhere, though were I live it never really began. Spring here means […]
Tagged week in reviewIn a word, no. Â But the relationship between consistency and speed is a little subtle. Â To look at this question let’s take the distance results from major international competitions (OWG, WSC or World Cups) and restrict ourselves to those times when an athlete did at least ten races in a particular season. Â Then for each […]
Tagged Analysis, technical, variability, variationSo I guess I need to post something again about how many WC “victories” Marit Bjørgen has, ground that we’ve covered in considerable depth before. The occasion for revisiting this topic is FIS’s press release trumpeting the fact that Bjørgen has officially reached 46 WC victories, matching the great Björn Dæhlie. As we discussed in […]
Tagged Distance, marit bjoergen, Sprint, statistics, victories, World CupDoogiski over at NordicXplained has a good post up regarding the rivalry (such as it is) between Marit Bjørgen and Justyna Kowlaczyk. The issue between the fans of these two great skiers is the question of which one is better. Shocker, I know. Doogiski gives a good rundown of some of the limitations of comparing […]
Tagged justyna kowalczyk, marit bjoergen, rivalryYou may have noticed that things have slowed down a bit here lately, which is natural with the season drawing to a close. I’m going to back off a bit with the posts and try to keep to just a Mon-Wed-Fri schedule during the off-season as best as I can. Some things I’m planning on […]
Tagged week in review