Statistical Skier

Since Kikkan Randall locked up the Sprint World Cup title this weekend with a (narrow) win over Marit Bjoergen, I thought it might be instructive to review their head-to-head history in sprinting:

The dashed line is the trend for freestyle races and the solid is classic. Dots in the red are victories for Kikkan and vice versa. With them meeting in only one freestyle sprint thus far this season, there isn’t enough data to continue that trend line beyond last season (numerically, at least).

This doesn’t take anything away from Kikkan’s accomplishments, but think this makes it pretty clear that it would be interesting to go through a season where Marit actually really wanted to win the Sprint World Cup overall title, and put every sprint on her schedule.

It’s remarked on in a few places that we might finally be seeing the effects of Kikkan Randall’s injury struggles over the summer. Another skier who had some strong early races and then has struggled as times during the season is Holly Brooks, so let’s look at their actual (WC, TDS and WSC) results from this season:

We can’t say much about Randall’s sprinting, since her most recent classic sprints aren’t really that far out of line with what we’d expect, and her freestyle sprints have been exactly what you’d expect. Similarly, we’d expect Randall’s distance results to tail off somewhat during the Tour, particularly after starting with a freestyle prologue. Still, the Tour was followed by a sub-par race and then no racing at all until WSC. I wouldn’t be surprised if she were sick briefly during that interim period as well. So there could be a lot going on here in addition to whatever effects her summer training may have had.

I think Brooks’ season is a little more clear cut, in terms of falling off slightly after the first 2-3 races. She’s shown a lot of promise at times, but just hasn’t managed to put together a full season yet. Hopefully she can rebound a bit during the final WC period.