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Post-WJC/U23 Development: Canada

In a short piece on FasterSkier the other day, I showed a graph that examined the FIS points vs. age trends of skiers broken down by their success at WJCs or U23s.  In it, I highlighted only the American athletes, apart from the general trends for all skiers.

I thought that I’d continue with a short series of posts where I recreate the same graph, but highlighting the development patterns of athletes from different nations.  I’m not going to analyze these graphs at great length.  Rather I’ll just focus on showing some interesting data.  First, we’ll look at Canada (click through for larger version): Continue reading ›

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2010 07 28 Joran WJC/U23 Comments (4) Permalink

Most Improved: Women’s Sprint

Continuing on from Monday’s post, we turn now to the most improved women sprinter last season.

Here’s the table of the top ten most improved female sprinters on the World Cup:

[table id=14]

First, the familiar names (at least, familiar to me).  Korosteleva and Ingemarsdotter are both excellent sprinters who’ve been around for at least a handful of seasons.  Astrid Jacobsen is an interesting name to appear: her best sprint seasons by far were ’06-’07 and ’07-’08.  She had a significant drop off the subsequent year in ’08-’09, which helps her show a major improvement for the ’09-’10 season.  Wikipedia is telling me that she had some significant injury and illness issues during the ’08-’09 season.  She appears to have bounced back with some good races in Vancouver, the Tour de Ski and one or two solid World Cup results.

Katja Visnar is a Slovenian skier who mainly seems to have succeeded in advancing further through the heats this past season, including several top ten results (6th, 8th and 9th).

Here’s the results for each of these ten skiers:

Recall that this is all using Distributed Sprint Points, which are explained here.  There are a lot of athletes here that I’m not so familiar with, so I’ll keep my commentary to a minimum.  Korosteleva’s “improvement” might also be mainly the result the slight dip in performance she had in 2008-2009.  French sprinter Aurore Cuinet had a handful of significantly improved sprints this year: 8th, 13th and 15th in World Cups.

Karianne Bjellaanes is a Norwegian sprinter I had actually not heard of before who definitely had two promising 5th place finishes in WCs last season.  Canadian Daria Gaiazova generally hasn’t had too much success sprinting but managed two 12th place finishes last season as well.

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2010 07 28 Joran Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

FasterSkier Article

The guys at FasterSkier were kind enough (again) to post something of mine at their site.  You can read it here.  I’ll be following up that article with more graphs highlighting skiers from different countries over the next week or two, so stay tuned…

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2010 07 27 Joran Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Tour de France Graphs: Fancy Versions

Here are the final, updated versions of the fancy, animated sprint and mountain points “graph” and the plot of riders who didn’t finish the Tour with mouse-over text added.

Remember, Chrome, Safari or Opera are the best browsers to use for these.  I don’t think any of these work with Internet Explorer and the animated one won’t work with Firefox.  You’ve been warned. Continue reading ›

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2010 07 26 Joran Cycling Comments (2) Permalink

Most Improved: Men’s Sprint

Now that I’ve introduced Distributed Sprint Points (DSPs), an alternate measure of sprint race performance, we’ll go ahead and give it a trial run, warts and all.  Since DSP is decidedly still in the experimental phase, take this with a hefty grain of salt.

My procedure will mostly track what I did to measure the most improved skiers in distance events.  For an explanation of my alternative sprint points measure, see here.  Once I’ve calculated these values, I simply found the difference in the average of each skier’s best five races.  Athlete’s who had done fewer than five sprint events in either the ’08-’09 or ’09-’10 season were ineligible.

The ten male skiers showing the biggest gains are shown in the following table. Continue reading ›

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2010 07 26 Joran Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

Tour de France Charts

With the final stage complete, it’s time to wrap things up with some final versions of the charts I’ve been making over the past week. Actually, this isn’t really the final post. I’ll be tinkering with some of them and posting what I come up with from time to time. Also, the fancier, SVG (scalable vector graphics) versions with mouse-over text and animations won’t be updated in this post. Look for those later in the week.  Also, if there’s something you’re dying to see, mention it in the comments and I’ll try to oblige if I can. Continue reading ›

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2010 07 25 Joran Cycling Comments (4) Permalink

Week In Review: Friday July 23rd

Cycling and the Tour de France have invaded Statistical Skier this week.  If you’ve been tuning in here for the skiing content and find this trend distressing, you can console yourself with the fact that the Tour will end soon.  On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed the cycling stage race graphics and so I have made the official decision to continue Statistical Skier’s treatment of cycling, but only for the grand tours: Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta de Espana.

Lots of stuff to recap this week:

  • I debuted an experimental method for adjusting FIS points in sprint events (Distributed Sprint Points) to account for the elimination rounds as well as qualification and looked at how that effected athlete rankings.
  • I engaged in a bit of editorializing on the subject of the increasingly fractured FIS race schedule.
  • Per a reader’s request, I looked more closely at the incredibly strong performance by the Canadian men at the most recent Olympics.
  • I made a rather frivolous graph examining the nationalities of various riders on Tour de France teams.
  • I totally pwned scalable vector graphics.  (The animations will not work in IE or Firefox, as far as I know.)
  • I engaged in an excessively complex look at which Tour stages thus far have had the biggest GC shakeups.
  • We continued to update the various forms of bump charts tracking the progress of Tour de France riders.

Have a great weekend!

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2010 07 23 Joran Week In Review Comments (0) Permalink