Statistical Skier

German biathlete Kati Wilhelm (sporting some delightful red hair, I might add) is the last (finally!) in my list of retiring athletes to cover.  That Wikipedia link tells me that she was actually dubbed “Little Red Riding Hood” by the German press due to both her hair and a red hat she wore for all races.

Wilhelm is an exceptionally accomplished biathlete: I found 69 podium finishes in major events (World Cup, Olympics or World Championships), which included 4 individual Olympic medals and 5 more from World Championships.  And of course that’s on top of numerous medal winning German relay teams.

Let’s take a look at her results:

Continue reading ›

There are two somewhat different ways in which you could be considered a skating or classic specialist.  First, you can be noticeably better at one technique than the other.  Second, you could just only do races of one technique or the other.

These two situations might overlap, or they might not.  In any case, they are easier to consider separately.  Let’s look first for skiers who specialize via participating primarily in one technique or the other.  Some ground rules: I’m going to toss skiers with fewer than 30 WC, OWG or WSC races in their career, pursuits with a break will count as one classic race and one skate race, pursuits without a break will count as half of classic race and half of a skate race.

We could get picky about changes over time, particularly with changes in the number of classic/skate races available on the schedule each season, but I’m going to ignore that for now.  Also, keep in mind that there will be skiers here who’s careers extend beyond my database, so the data for them is incomplete.  Requiring at least 30 races weeds out the more extreme examples of this, but not all.

First let’s look at the distribution of the percentage of skate and classic races by athlete for their entire career: Continue reading ›

No pretty pictures this time, folks, sorry!  Instead a couple of regular old sortable tables.  No grand lesson here, just a simple question: how often can the best skiers in the world ski fast enough to finish in the top 3?  The top 10?  And so on.  (I apologize that some of the column headers are hard to read.  They are the proportion of races each skier landed in the top 3, 5, 10, 20 and 30, in that order.)

One table each for distance and sprint; men and women will have to share a table in each case.  For the distance skiers, I’ve only included skiers who started racing around 1994 or so to make sure I’m not counting just the last season of someone who raced through most of the eighties.  That means no Bjoern Daehlie, sorry.  Or plenty of other big names.  Just so you know, his percentages were freakishly high, but then, I’m missing at least two seasons of results for him.  Only WC, OWG and WSC races are counted.

I guess I take it back, there is a grand lesson here.  I suppose I meant for you to think about how we measure success in a sport like cross country skiing, where the best skiers in the world finish outside the top ten a large proportion of the time (seriously, check out the tables).  It’s easy to remember all the times these crazy athletes skied super fast.  Not so with their failures.  It sort of reminds me of baseball, where the best hitters in the game fail around 65% of the time.

As always, the RSS feed doesn’t like these tables, so you’ll have to click through to the site to see them.

[table id = 63]

[table id = 64]

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