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Is Petter Northug Serious?

That’s an easy one: probably not. I’m referring, of course, to his recent pronouncements about the upcoming season, in which he claims that he will win 7 World Cups, the Tour de Ski overall title, as well as 3 golds at World Championships.

Obviously, given Northug’s history I’m not inclined to take this too seriously. He likes to make waves from time to time, which is why we love him so. But just for fun, let’s delve a bit into just how impressive a season that would be. As always, all the following comparisons will be for all seasons back to 1992 or so.

In that time, a skier has won at least 7 individual World Cup (sprint or distance) races a total of 15 times. Five times by Bjørgen, twice by each of Kowalczyk, Kuitunen and Skari Martinsen, and once each by Di Centa, Vaelbe, Majdic and…..Petter Northug. (In case you’re wondering, this metric is a little unfair to Bjoern Daehlie, who was in his prime at a time when there were somewhat fewer WC races on the schedule, and for much of that time was basically splitting the victories with Smirnov.)

So there’s at least some precedent for Northug’s 7 WC wins claim. Note that he’s the only male skier on that list!

But the real kicker is actually the three WSC golds. In the modern era (i.e. since 1992), who has won at least three golds at a single major championships (Olympics or WSCs)? That has happened a total of five times, by Bjørgen (of course), but then the list gets a little, shall we say, dubious. They rest are: Myllylae in 1999, Vaelbe in 1997, and then both Lazutina and Smirnov in the somewhat infamous 1995 World Championships.

That suggests, of course, that the only person to do both, win 7 individual WC events as well as 3 golds at a major championships in a single season is Bjørgen. (She did not race in the Tour de Ski that year.) And frankly, that season is shaping up to be a bit of an outlier even for her.

So there you have it. If Northug comes through on his promise, I will be the first to doff my cap…but I wouldn’t bet on it.

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2012 09 20 Joran Analysis
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Stephen’s Climb to the Castle Margin

Liz Stephen destroyed the women’s field this weekend in the annual Climb to the Castle rollerski race. The margin, just over 5 minutes in a race that took the leaders between 40-45 minutes is certainly impressive. But I think that margin doesn’t provide much useful information.

Time trials that are most useful as gauges of performance trends are the ones that have the most stable, repeatable conditions. I believe Climb to the Castle has everyone using identical roller skis (at least that’s my recollection) and that helps. But as noted in the coverage, road and weather conditions can pretty severely impact times. In that light, the fact that Stephen covered the course more than a minute faster than last year in worse conditions is certainly a more reliably good indicator.

But even then, it’s sort of crucial to note how the race dynamics played out. Stephen skied alone basically the whole way this year. Last year, it sounded like she skied alone for over half the race. That will tend to make those efforts more similar to those produced by a interval start race, which are easier to compare, I think. For example, it’s hard to read much into the fact that Sargent skied around 2.5 minutes slower this time around, since once Stephen was off the front it’s easy for “group racing” mentalities to take over common in mass start events that slow the pace.

Even if we ignore all that, consider than Sargent and Diggins were around 12.3% and 11.7% behind Stephen. Looks at their head-to-head results from recent history, it’s hard to believe that Stephen really is that much faster than Sargent and Diggins:

Diggins was actually frequently faster than Stephen last season, and even then it was unusual for the margin between them to be more than 2.5% in either direction. Even Sargent, who had somewhat of a rough season, was almost never more than 10% behind Stephen.

As a data guy, I’d love to see Climb to the Castle run as an interval start race, which would somewhat improve it’s use as a benchmark, but you’d still have a hard time accounting for differences in weather, particularly wind. But obviously, that’s logistically more complicated.

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2012 09 18 Joran Analysis
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Minor Leagues

OPA Cup races (also known as Alpen Cup) and Scandinavian Cup races have acquired an informal reputation as a sort of “minor league” racing circuit, relative to the World Cup.  One question this leads me to ask is exactly how much movement is there between these two circuits?

To answer this question I took data from skiers who had started in at least one World Cup and at least one OPA or Scandinavian Cup race since the 2004-2005 season.  This yielded 543 men and 352 women.  This is a rather wide net, since I’m including skiers who may have done one WC race in 2005 and then only OPA Cups, or vice versa.

Here is a graph that shows the number of starts of each type for men and women:

Each dot represents a different skier.  The number of starts is the total (distance and sprint) over 6 seasons (04-05 to 09-10) and the points have been plotted with some alpha blending since many are directly on top of each other.  Darker areas correspond to more points being plotted.

As you can see, the overwhelming majority of skiers who have done both types of races have done fewer than 15 of each type.  Much of that racing is spread over 6 seasons.  The skiers who’ve done a ton of WC’s tend not to have done many OPA or Scandinavian Cups, which isn’t terribly surprising.

As we move away from each axis, we get the skiers who’ve come the closest to splitting their time between these two racing circuits.  As you can see, they exist, but not in huge numbers.  Most of the OPA Cup skiers are probably getting their WC starts as part of Nation’s Group starts, rather than being rotated back and forth within or between seasons.

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2012 09 13 Joran Uncategorized Comments (1) Permalink

Trends In Race Times: Biathlon

I haven’t posted anything looking at biathlon for a while, so…

Since biathlon has had much more consistent race formats over the years and since we don’t need to split up the data by technique, we should be able to get a clearer picture of any trends on the gun-happy side of things.

The graph below is too small to see.  You’ll have to click through for the full version, which ought to be fairly self-explanatory.

These are the top 10 times in each major race.  We can clearly see that race times have been falling.  In fact, if you look closely you’ll see that times have dropped quite a lot in some cases.

Some other things we can note: the mass start races, true to form, seem a bit slow for the distance, particularly for the women.  It’s so strange that people find it so hard (psychologically) to press the pace in a mass start race…

You can’t really see it in the sprint races, but the rest display a leveling of the time trends followed by an second dip.  The individual races seemed to plateau a bit between 1998-2003 while the mass start races appear to exhibit a similar trend between 2003-2007.  It could just be a fluke, I suppose.  In any case, I can’t think of any explanation for it at all.

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2012 09 11 Joran Biathlon Comments (3) Permalink

Swedish Women By Individual

Following up from last time, we’ll look a little more closely at the individual trends among some of the top Swedish women in distance and sprint events.

First the distance skiers (click through for a larger version):

Not surprisingly, Charlotte Kalla is generally the top performer here. But notice that there’s a bit of a solid drop off after her and Anna Haag. Maria Rydqvist surprised many by coming back from a year off with some very solid results, but then seemed to hit a bit of a plateau last season. Sofia Bleckur took a large jump last season, but the move from 0.5-1 standardized percent behind the median skier to -0.5 to -1 standardized percent behind the median isn’t quite as challenging. The next jump will likely be orders of magnitude harder.

I believe I’ve commented on this before, but Anna Haag’s trend over the past three seasons is a bit worrying. The Swedish women had a very strong year in 2010, but both Kalla and especially Haag seem to have experienced a bit of “regression to the mean”. That makes me wonder whether Haag’s 2010 campaign (and to a certain extent even Kalla’s) was the best we’ll see from her.

As for the sprinters (again, click for full version): Continue reading ›

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2012 09 06 Joran Analysis
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Swedish Women

Reading the recent interview with Rikard Grip, the Swedish women’s coach got me thinking about how they’ve fared recently. From a very broad perspective for the whole team, we have the following in distance events:

Clearly their depth has greatly improved, as evidenced by the dramatic rise in the number of top 30 results per WC race. Most other categories are generally up as well over the last 4-5 seasons. I try not to read too much into the (rather noisy) year to year variations in these plots, but instead try to folks are broader trends over several seasons.

On the sprinting side: Continue reading ›

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2012 09 04 Joran Analysis
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How long will Freeman and Randall remain on top?

Kris Freeman and Kikkan Randall have been basically the top US skiers for quite some time now. (I’m sort of brushing Andrew Newell under the rug here, mostly just due to time contraints. I’ll do a follow up on him next week.)

Freeman has been more or less unquestionably the best US male distance skier for what seems like forever, and Randall has been fairly dominant domestically in both distance and sprint events. How long can this last? Not forever, of course. Nothing lasts forever.

But it seems like the shift may happen sooner on the men’s side than the women’s. Here’s what I mean:

This shows the head-to-head results of Freeman against a handful of the better US men’s distance skiers in recent years. Certainly, Freeman has way more wins (above zero, in the pink) than losses (below zero, in the blue). But the gaps are generally narrowing.

Now, there’s a big caveat here in that I can’t say much about whether Freeman is getting slower, or these guys are getting faster, or even if Freeman is getting faster but these guys are getting faster faster. (That made you think for a second, didn’t it?) Or maybe they’re all getting slower, and Freeman is getting slower faster. (See, now I’m just having fun messing with your head.) The point is that these are just relative comparisons, not absolute ones.

In any case, what does the similar picture look like for Kikkan Randall? Continue reading ›

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2012 08 30 Joran Analysis
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