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Career Retrospective: Martina Beck

Biathletes retire too!  I will be the first to admit that I know a lot less about biathlon than cross country, though, so these athlete profile posts for biathletes will be as much for my benefit as yours.

Martina Beck is (was) a very fast German biathlete.  The International Biathlon Union has a nice article about her career and her decision to retire.  Rumor has it she was an excellent shot, as well.

Since I’m much less of a biathlon expert, rather than pontificate on specific race results let’s just look at some data for her career… Continue reading ›

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2010 08 13 Joran Career Retrospective Comments (0) Permalink

Post-WJC/U23 Development: Italy

Yet another in a continuing series.  This time, Italy.  First up is the original form of the graph where each panel contains athletes grouped by their best performance at WJCs or U23s (1-5, 6-10, etc.):

Continue reading ›

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2010 08 11 Joran WJC/U23 Comments (0) Permalink

Victims & Nemeses: Sweden Edition

In this installment of Victims & Nemeses, we consider the Swedish star skiers Marcus Hellner and Charlotte Kalla.  Who are their victims (people they defeat often by small margins) and nemeses (people who beat them often by small margins)?

Let’s take a look… Continue reading ›

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2010 08 10 Joran Fun Stuff
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Most Unimproved: Women’s Sprint

So far, applying my alternative sprint points measure to look at skiers with major improvements or declines between seasons has worked OK, but when we turn to female sprinters who saw a major decline things get dicey. Continue reading ›

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2010 08 09 Joran Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

Week In Review: Friday August 6th

My Summer of Weddings continues this weekend, with some travel and a race to follow.  Fun times!  Here’s what we’ve acomplished at Statistical Skier this week:

  • Putting Distributed Sprint Points to good use we looked at the most unimproved male sprinters from last season.
  • Following a suggestion from a reader, I looked at whether there might be a relationship between a skier’s World Junior results and winning medals.  The results were murky.
  • We took a closer look at how Marcus Hellner faired versus his arch-rival Petter Northug last season.
  • Finally, we wrapped up the list of cross-country skier retirements with a look back at the career of Swiss skier Laurence Rochat.

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2010 08 06 Joran Week In Review Comments (0) Permalink

Career Retrospective: Laurence Rochat

Who?  Yeah, I’d never heard of her either.  One of the coolest parts of working on this website is learning how much I didn’t know about international ski racing.

The fact that I don’t know about this Swiss skier doesn’t really say anything about her (she’s done 115 World Cup races, 7 World Championship races and 4 Olympic races!), rather it says something about hard it can be to follow international ski racing from the US.  So, working on this website has made me a much more informed fan of the sport…

Still, Rochat isn’t exactly a household name, so it isn’t surprising that she hasn’t racked up a ton of top results.  Still, she won a Bronze medal in Salt Lake in the relay; she’s finished in the top-20 in World Cup (or Tour de Ski) races 19 times.  Her best was an 8th in a freestyle sprint.  She also finished 15th at the Turin Olympics sprint event.  And just for variety, she has a 12th in a 30km classic mass start at the 2005 World Champs.  Finally, Rochat won the Engadin marathon in 2007.  From the perspective of a fan of US skiing, that career is nothing to shake a stick at.

Let’s take a look at her distance results: Continue reading ›

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2010 08 06 Joran Career Retrospective Comments (0) Permalink

Did Petter Northug Have a Slight Edge On Marcus Hellner?

That’s what Marcus Hellner says, according to FasterSkier.  Let’s go to the numbers, shall we?

These are all the times these two guys raced against each other last season (distance races, anyway).  Positive values indicate a victory for Hellner and vice versa.  You can see Northug’s strength in mass start races, and that Northug had two unusually bad races.  A handful of Northug’s wins were by very small margins and two of them were in stage race prologues, which, let’s face it, are kind of lame.  Still, I would give Northug a slight edge here.

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2010 08 05 Joran Head-To-Head Comments (1) Permalink