Statistical Skier

I can’t believe I forgot about the dominant Estonian skier Kristina Smigun-Vaehi.  For individual events (distance and sprint), her stats are amazing: three Olympic medals (2 Gold), four World Championship medals and forty-nine World Cup podiums.  106 of her 161 World Cup results were top ten finishes.  She might not have as much Olympic hardware as a few of her contemporaries, but she always seemed to be in the hunt for a medal.

Of course, Smigun ran into a spot of trouble back in 2002 I believe, testing positive for steroids but was officially “cleared” by FIS when her B sample came up clean.  Needless to say, a lot of people remained suspicious, which is par for the course when doping is involved.  In any case, let’s take a look back at her career, distance races first:

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One of my articles for FasterSkier.com looked at variability in skier performance, particularly among elite World Cup skiers.  In truth, I kind of dashed that article off in a hurry simply because Kris Freeman happened to make a comment about the topic on his blog, and have always wanted to come back to the subject. Continue reading ›