We’re picking up from where we left off last time, so go check that out to get up to speed.
What happens if instead of only looking at two groups (skiers reaching the podium, skiers not reaching the podium) we get a little more sophisticated and include more information?
First, let’s just look to see what relationship there might be between someone’s best WJC result and their best WC, OWG or WSC result:
Tagged development, Distance, podium, WJC/U23I recently received the following query from a reader:
I have looked lately into the Junior Worlds results and World Cup/World Championships results of all 2010 Olympic Gold medalists and almost all of them had an outstanding careers while they raced as juniors…If our end goal is to win Olympics then we have to look backwards from it and find common elements. So far the common thread I found based on 2010 Olympic podium athletes that if athlete is not fast by the age 19 the chance of winning Olympics gets very small. I was curious if you looked [at] it from [a] similar angle and from previous Olympic games.
This kind of question comes up a lot, I think, and is related to the posts I’ve been doing that look at plots of age vs. FIS points for skiers broken down by how successful they were at WJC/U23s.
I need to say up front that my ability to tackle this question is extremely limited. Â It’s difficult to acquire useful data on top athletes when they were juniors (i.e. prior to age 20 or so). Â I focus almost exclusively on results that are available at FIS. Â How many junior races abroad aren’t FIS sanctioned? Â Even if you start combing the FIS website, you’ll see that results for junior races (other than WJCs) did not really begin to be added with regularity until ~2003.
This means that my only available measure of how fast someone was as a junior is their WJCs results. Â Now, I think we can all agree that using two races from one season may not capture how “fast” someone was at that age. Â So right off the bat, we should take this with a huge grain of salt.
Tagged development, Distance, medals, podium, WJC/U23The degree to which Distributed Sprint Points sensibly pick out skiers who had large drop offs or improvements between the ’08-’09 and ’09-’10 seasons appears to be mixed. Â But for the sake of symmetry, let’s look at the unhappy end of these trends.
The table below shows the male skiers with the biggest drop offs between the two most reason seasons:
Tagged distributed sprint points, dsp, men, most unimproved, SprintWhat’s have you missed this week? Â Read on and I’ll tell you…
Holy crap, I didn’t realize I posted this much stuff this week.
Tagged week in reviewAnother installment looking at how athletes have faired following WJC/U23 racing.
This time we’re looking at Germany, a country that gained some notoriety over the last 10-15 years for a dramatic turnaround in athlete development. Â At least, that’s what I remember the conventional wisdom being.
We’ll start with just the basic graph (click through for larger version): Continue reading ›
Tagged development, Distance, U23, WJCThe career retrospectives took an unintentional week off last Friday due my being distracted by the Tour.
Milan who? Â Again, a skier who’s name I should probably know, but did not. Â He’s a Czech skier who’d been competing internationally since around 2000.
Particularly since he looks like a fun guy.
Sperl won a Bronze medal in the team sprint event at the 2007 World Championships. Â He’s been an important part of some solid Czech distance relay teams over the years as well. Â His best individual result was a 6th place in the 50km classic at the 2005 World Championships. Continue reading ›
Tagged milan sperl, retirement, retrospectiveI apologize again for the heavy cycling bent I’ve been on lately. Â You just can’t pass up the chance to make fun graphs like these, though.
This is just your standard bumps chart for GC rank from the 2010 Giro d’Italia. Â Somewhat confusingly (to casual bike fans like me) the colors of the jerseys are different than in the Tour de France. Â So the overall race leader here wears pink, the sprint points leader wears red (although this has apparently changed several times through the years) and the mountain (or climbing) points leader wears green.
The classification of each stage into mountain, mixed, etc. I simply took from here. Â The graph is below the fold: Continue reading ›
Tagged bump chart, cycling, giro d'italia