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First WC vs Performance

Continuing with the athlete development theme recently, here’s a graph showing the age at which a skier races in their first WC versus their overall median WC result:

For fairly obvious reasons, you have read this fairly carefully, particularly at the more extreme ages. I wouldn’t pay much attention to either panel past the age of 30, simply due to sample size.

What I find interesting about this is that for the men, at least, it reinforces the idea that 25 is really the maximum age at which you want to be cutting your teeth on the WC circuit. The relationship for the women is more stable, indicating an interesting contrast between the genders. It seems that it’s at least more likely for women to start late and not perform (on average, across all skiers) significantly worse than folks who started on the WC at a fairly young age. I want to emphasize that that’s a relative conclusion, i.e. that we’re simply saying that the women are more likely to see that happen than the men, rather than saying the women are generally likely to start late and perform really well.

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2012 11 08 Joran Analysis
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Domestic Podium Development

I got a request for some similar graphs from my podium development posts, but focused more on the domestic scene. So, for example, we had this graph:

This showed the age at which future WC podium finishers achieved a particular milestone. So let’s turn to just US and Canadian skiers who have simply participated in a WC over roughly the same time span and make a similar graph, with a slightly expanded set of milestones:

Sprint and distance have all been lumped together here. The only thing I’m going to point out with this is the rather dramatic age difference for the skier’s first WC start. Note how for the international podium winners, it is virtually unheard of for them to have cut their teeth on the WC after the age of 25. Now look at the domestic graph; many more of our WC athletes are getting their first taste of WC action at a very late age.

It’s important, as always, not to confuse cause and effect here. Dumping skiers into a WC at the age of 21 won’t magically turn them into podium material. (But it might not hurt…) A more plausible explanation might be that other countries are doing a systematically better job at developing athletes faster, such that they are at the right stage of their development for a first WC start at a significantly earlier age.

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2012 11 06 Joran Analysis
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Alpine World Cup – Soelden

Just following up from Tuesday with the race snapshot graph for the women’s GS race on Saturday:

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2012 11 01 Joran Alpine
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Alpine World Cup – Soelden

While we’re waiting for the cross-country season to get under way…

The alpine World Cup season kicked off this past weekend in Soelden, Austria with Giant Slalom events for both men and women. Here’s a race snapshot graph for the men’s race on Sunday:

American Ted Ligety won by a rather impressive margin. Apparently, that was the biggest (absolute) winning margin since the late 70’s. Obviously, I can’t look much further back than the early 90’s, but I can’t contradict that. Of course, if you look outside of GS, you can find some combined events with bigger margins, but that’s really apples and oranges.

The next closest winning margin I can find in recent history is Hermann Meier’s win over Albeto Tomba way back in 1998. If you want to expand things a bit further, there’s a women’s GS World Cup in Park City in 1997 with a larger winning margin.

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2012 10 30 Joran Alpine
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Moosilauke – Full History

After correcting a few typos in the the “official” results I thought we’d look again at the time histories for Dartmouth’s Moosilauke time trial. The following graph depicts every result (except for 2011, which I still can’t find anywhere).

The blue is the median for each individual running; this includes both summer and fall times. Despite some course changes over time, it’s interesting that you probably wouldn’t be able to spot exactly when they happened from the graphs. There’s just a bit too much noise in there.

The cross country men (i.e. men actual on the Dartmouth Ski Team) have, on average actually been getting slower, in an absolute sense. But definitely the strongest trend is in the alpine men. Course changes aside, it would be interesting to look up who was on the alpine men’s team at Dartmouth in the early 90’s.

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2012 10 25 Joran Analysis
Cross Country
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Moosilauke Time Trial – Fall 2012

As FasterSkier mentioned the other day, the Dartmouth Ski Team’s Moosilauke time trial is a pretty neat data set, since they’ve kept the data going back quite a ways. Interpretations are sometimes a challenge, since the course has changed from time to time when trail work is done. My sources tell me that in addition to the weather being horrendous this year the trail was slightly rerouted, possibly adding some distance to the course.

Given all this, the times were a bit slow (click for full version):

Those are only the fall term runnings, and 2011 is missing, since those times appear to be missing on the official historical results.

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2012 10 23 Joran Analysis
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Best Season Ever: Distance

Well, ok, not ever.  Just over the past 20 seasons or so.

There are all sorts of different ways we could measure this.  First, some ground rules: I’m only going to look at actual World Cup races, no Olympics or World Championships.  I’m also excluding Tour de Ski events because these are my rules, so I get to make them up.  Seriously, though, I think Olympic and World Championship races should count differently (i.e. more), so later on I’ll redo this but in a weighted fashion.

I’m not going to just single out a skier’s top five races, either.  If you’re going be considered for a “best season ever” prize, we’re not going to ignore a handful bad races!  Also, you must to have done at least 5 races for your season to count. Continue reading ›

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2012 10 18 Joran Analysis
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