The race snapshots are graphs that I post for basically every World Cup, Olympic or World Championship race. Previously, I’ve done this for both XC and biathlon, but time constraints have forced me to narrow my focus somewhat back down to just XC.
The graphs will show the top 30 skiers, plus any North Americans. The alternating color blocks mark every ten skiers.
The basic idea is that we measure how the skier did in this particular race (the red dot) compared to how they “typically” have done over the last season or two (black bars or dots). Some athletes will have a black horizontal bar, representing they “typical” performance range of the last several seasons. For statistical reasons, if an athlete has only a very few races over that time period, it doesn’t make sense to plot a range, so instead I simply show their previous results themselves (the black dots). Occasionally, you’ll see someone doing their first WC race ever, and so they will only have the red dot.
The two panels show these comparisons for all races (“Overall”) and for races of the same technique (i.e. “Classic”, “Freestyle”, “Pursuit”).
The performance measure I use (the x axis) will generally either be the final finishing place (sprint races) or standardized percent behind the median skier (distance races).