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FIS Points in Europe vs North America

I thought I check in on the most recent season and compare the point availability for North American skiers in Europe versus at home. This was a pretty simple approach, I just took all US and Canadian skiers who raced in both North America and Europe last season (any race type) and calculated the difference in their median FIS points for the two locations. Finally, I did a simple density estimate on the difference to get this:

eur_nam_points

 

The x axis here is relative, not absolute. So -100 means a person’s median points in North America last season were 100% better than their median points in Europe. I’ve omitted the y axis labels entirely, since the idea here is to simply look at the shape of the curve, and where most of the area is located.

The men’s sprint panel sticks out like a sore thumb for being so damn perfect looking. This strongly suggests that as a group, North American male sprinters weren’t really any more likely to score better FIS points in Europe or “at home”. As the distribution makes clear, though, there is plenty of variation between individuals and how their particular races went at home and abroad.

While we’re on sprinting, my next biggest surprise was the women, who appear to have had a moderate trend towards scoring better sprint points in Europe. Before you start saying that Kikkan Randall is driving this, keep in mind that Kikkan only contributed a single value to that density estimate. Each individual skier only counts once in each graph. So maybe between Kikkan, Jessie Diggins, Ida Sargeant, etc., one might have expected some good points in Europe, but I wasn’t quite expecting it too be that clear.

The distance panels aren’t too surprising, I think. Even with the recent improvements for the US women in distance events, US and Canadian skiers are still much more likely score lower points in North America than in Europe.

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2013 10 02 Joran Analysis Comments (0) Permalink

US Development – Men

Continuing on from earlier this week, we’ll look at some US men in the “development pipeline”, although I use that term pretty loosely. Basically I just mean some of the top US men who aren’t necessarily obviously going to be skiing WC full time or something. (Click for full versions.)

men1 men2

 

Miles Havlick and Erik Bjornsen are interesting cases, similar to Joanne Reid as I mentioned earlier. His FIS point trend is promising, but he’s mostly been on the “easy” part of the curve up until now.

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2013 09 27 Joran Analysis
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US Development – Women

I’m going to run two quick posts looking in on some of the US’s top men and women in the development pipeline (all that really means is that I’ve mostly, but not completely, excluded some “obvious” US Ski Team members).

We can check in on how these folks are doing by using my cohort plots, which compare their FIS points vs. age to the FIS points vs age earned by skiers who went on to finish in the top ten in a WC/OWG/WSC event. That’s a fairly low bar of just one top ten finish, ever, since I want to emphasize that I’m trying to be as generous as possible here. The following two plots summarize a few of the top US women (click for full versions):

wom1 wom2

 

The blue lines are the median FIS points for each athlete, and the gray shaded regions show the equivalent range of values at that age across all athletes who went on to achieve a top ten result in a WC/WSC/OWG event. I think this mostly speaks for itself, but I wanted to draw attention to Joanne Reid. One aspect of plots like these is that it’s much easier to look like you’re “on the path” prior to age 22 or so, simply because the FIS point curve bends so steeply up when you go back that young. She’s one to watch, but the next two years, where the FIS point curve start to flatten out, will be the first real test to see if she can keep pace.

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2013 09 24 Joran Analysis
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Pre-Olympic Performance

The Sochi Olympics are naturally going to be the focus this season, and all the attention during Olympics is on winning medals. So naturally, much of the conversation of the next six months or so is going revolve around “Who’s going to win a medal at Sochi?”

Well, from one perspective, the answer is pretty simple: people who’ve been on the podium in the 1-1.5 seasons leading up to the Olympics. I’ll show you what I mean.

Let’s take all individual event podium finishers in each OWG/WSC back to 2002. That’s 3 Olympics and 3 World Championships. Next, we grab each of these people’s results in major international events during the preceding season and half or so. So for example, Alex Harvey earned a sprint medal at the 2013 WSC, so we’d pull all his sprint results for 2012-2013 prior to WSC, as well as everything from 2011-2012. Repeat for each podium finisher.

The graph below shows each podium winning skier’s best and median result in the 1.5 years leading up to an OWG/WSC podium:

pre_pod

 

The red line marks 3rd place.

So you can see just how rare it is for someone to land on the podium in a WSC/OWG without at least one podium finish in a WC or better event during the preceding year or so. And even for the folks who win a medal at a WSC/OWG event without a preceding podium finish, they are still managing to land in the top 10 in all but one instance.

Even more telling to me are the median results of the preceding 1.5 seasons. For women’s distance podium finishers at the WSC/OWG, their typical race over the previous 1.5 seasons is almost always a top ten finish.

Now, who actually were some of the exceptions in the graph above?

For brevity, only looking at the sprinting side, we had Alexander Panzhinskiy in 2010 and Peter Schlickenrieder (remember him?) in 2002, who’s best preceding sprint result was 5th. Roddy Darragon in 2006 and Alex Harvey in 2013, who’s recent best was 4th. Then we had the unusual year 2005, which had Sara Renner, Emelie Oehrstig, Lina Andersson and Vassili Rotchev who’s previous bests were 7th, 4th, 8th and 6th. Lina Andersson hadn’t even made the finals in the previous year and a half.

So who’s going to win medals in Sochi? Almost entirely the usual suspects. And maybe 1-3 folks who haven’t recently finished on the podium, but who have been regulars in the top ten.

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2013 09 05 Joran Analysis
Cross Country
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Is Kikkan the Gold Medal Favorite?

One topic that’s going to come up over and over again over the next 10 months or so is to what degree Kikkan Randall may be the gold medal “favorite” for the freestyle sprint in Sochi.

If you look over the past several seasons, the first thing you have to note is that two of the more dominant freestyle sprinters are now retired: Arianna Follis and Petra Majdic. Vesna Fabjan is a decent sprinter, but she’s never beaten Kikkan in the twelve times they’ve met in freestyle sprints over the past two seasons. Similarly, Hanna Falk is 0-7, Celine Brun-Lie is 0-6 and Natalia Matveeva is 0-9. Ingvild Flugstad Oestberg? She’s 1-9.

The most obvious threats, in terms of how they’ve performed against Kikkan directly, would appear to be Ida Ingemarsdotter, Maiken Caspersen Falla and of course Marit Bjoergen. Ingemarsdotter and Falla are both 3-6 against Kikkan over the past two seasons, while Bjoergen is 1-3. And in Bjoergen’s case, we need to be careful to consider that they only faced each other once last season, and sprints did not seem to be a major focus for Marit.

kikkan_sochi_odds

 

All three, Bjoergen, Falla and Ingemarsdotter did many fewer freestyle sprints last season than the year before, and I have no idea to what degree they will all consider the Olympic sprint a “focus” race next season. But there are 5 freestyle sprints (if you count the one during the TdS) prior to Sochi next year. Those five races will probably be the most informative on the question of picking a favorite for Sochi. But at the moment, I still consider the gold medal basically a toss-up between Kikkand and Marit.

(Allowing, of course, for the fact that sprinting is insane, and crashes can happen at any time to anyone. You never know…)

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2013 06 20 Joran Analysis
Cross Country
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Revisiting Bjoergen vs Skari vs Vaelbe

Sorry for my recent absence. Never fear, I haven’t abandoned this project, but things may be a bit more sparse than usual over the summer. Feel free to drop me a line with question or ideas for posts, though, as that will be good motivation for me.

In that vein, a reader asked me to revisit a post I did quite a while ago comparing Bjoergen, Skari and Vaelbe. As before, we need to note that I really only have data on the later years of Vaelbe’s career. But here’s what I have (click for larger version):

bjoergen_skari_vaelbe

 

The 2010-2011 season is looking more and more like a bit of an outlier for Bjoergen, but she’s still maintaining a somewhat better median performance than Vaelbe did later in her career. Skari is probably roughly on par with Bjoergen, though Bjoergen has had considerably fewer “bad” races of late.

2013 06 13 Joran Analysis
Cross Country
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USST Nominations

Kris Freeman obviously isn’t the only US Ski Team nomination to discuss, so let’s take look at a few other folks. Starting with a few people generally thought of a “sprinters”:

sprint

 

These are the major international sprint results for these three skiers. Simi Hamilton was dropped down from the A to the B team. He has always been quite inconsistent, sometimes back in the 50s, sometimes advancing through several heats. Note that last season was generally pretty strong for him. His bad races were ones where he just missed qualifying, rather than being way off the pace. This year he was back to his old ways, and judging only from media reports in places like FasterSkier, he seems to have difficulty staying healthy. Or maybe just bad luck. Either way, my guess is that the USST basically has people on a two season leash. Last season was fairly promising for Simi, so he probably bought himself a bit of slack for one season. I’d be willing to bet, though, that if he has another year like this one, or worse, his spot will be in trouble.

Sadie Bjornsen and Ida Sargent are kind of an interesting contrast. Sargent’s results are in two distinct groups: just outside of qualifying, or top 20. Bjornsen on the other hand had one excellent sprint result, and then was generally in the 20-35th zone the rest of the time. But both improved dramatically over last season.

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2013 05 01 Joran Analysis
Cross Country
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