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Giro d’Italia: After Stage 10

A slightly different look at things this time, broken down by team, through Stage 10 (yesterday). This one’s a little big, so you can click on it for the full version.

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2012 05 16 Joran Cycling
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Giro d’Italia – After Stage 8

I’ve been a little distracted lately, so I haven’t been as organized with the cycling data. Also, when you only do something once a year (or so) it’s pretty shocking how much better at coding you get in a year. My cycling code was a God-Awful mess, which is being slowly improved.

As usual, these cycling posts are light on analysis; mainly just an opportunity for me to have fun making pretty graphs. So here’s the state of affairs after Stage 8 (yesterday) compared to the previous two Giros:

 

The description for each stage is not my judgement, it’s simply taken from the Wikipedia page for each Giro.

The previous two Giros saw some splits in the field somewhat earlier, by stage 2-3 in 2010 and stage 5 in 2011, before starting to shell people for real when it hits the actual mountainous terrain.

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2012 05 14 Joran Cycling
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Career Retrospective: Silvana Bucher

Another retiring skier that I’m only passingly familiar with, Switzerland’s Silvana Bucher. Like Vina the other day, she hasn’t raced a ton at the WC level in distance events:

Or sprints: Continue reading ›

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2012 05 11 Joran Career Retrospective
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Career Retrospective: Emilie Vina

A few other athletes that I was less familiar with are also retiring, according to FIS, beginning with France’s Emilie Vina. Naturally, I head over to Wikipedia and discover that apparently she’s a non-commissioned officer? Huh. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she were a biathlete, I suppose, but that’s not a combination you see much in cross country.

Compared to many of the retiring skiers I profile here, her distance WC racing was relatively limited:

And not her most successful event. She did do a lot more sprinting, though: Continue reading ›

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2012 05 09 Joran Career Retrospective
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Holly Brooks deserves a spot on the A team

No, not that A-Team. (Although she’d probably kick some butt.)

As discussed recently over at FasterSkier, Brooks just missed qualifying via objective criteria, as she finished 55th in the World Cup overall. That means that if she’s named, it will have to be based upon some discretionary judgement by the coaches. I think you can make a pretty good case that Brooks deserves a spot.

First let’s review her distance results, compared to a few of her peers:

This doesn’t make her look very good, although she still comes out looking pretty favorably compared to Sargent and even Stephen, to a certain degree. But as we all know, Brooks broke her wrist over Christmas, and then proceeded to race through the injury for several weeks. What does her season look like if we drop her post-injury results? Continue reading ›

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2012 05 07 Joran Analysis
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Career Retrospective: Ivan Batory

Woo hoo! Another classic specialist! Ivan Batory has been around the block a few times. The first WC race I have for him is all the way back in the 1994 season. Let’s see, I think I was a freshmen in high school that year.

Among Batory’s top 30 results, 63 were classic, 31 freestyle and 20 in mixed technique events (i.e. pursuits). While his best results were undeniably weighted towards classic races, his median results actually weren’t that lopsided:

At least, they weren’t too lopsided during his heyday. As he got older, Batory did seem to let his skating slip a bit. He dabbled in sprinting, during the early days of the event: Continue reading ›

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2012 05 04 Joran Analysis
Career Retrospective
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Career Retrospective: Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset

A skier after my own heart, he was! Skating? Bah! That’s for losers!

Hjelmeset was the quintessential classic specialist:

If you’re basically only going to do classic races, you’d better be pretty good at them, and Hjelmeset certainly was. His World Cup career included 119 classic starts, only 26 freestyle starts and another 9 pursuits (mixed technique). All but one of his 26 WC podiums were in classic races. Those podiums included 4 World Championships podiums and one Olympic podium.

That’s one area that being such a specialist will hurt you: the Olympics only come once every four years, the techniques will alternate on the events, and nations won’t be as likely to use one of their spots on someone who can only do 1-2 events.

But his one WC podium in a freestyle race opens up the window to the other quirky aspect of Hjelmeset’s racing. It actually came in a sprint race, waaaay back in the day in 2001. Hjelmeset excelled at classic skiing, and amusingly it didn’t much matter what the distance was.

He finished his career with 7 WC level sprint podiums and 9 distance podiums in races 30km or longer. The only other skiers even remotely close in terms of that split are Petter Northug (14 sprint, 17 30km+) and Dario Cologna (7 sprint, 7 30km+). And they just happen to be essentially the two best all around male skiers.

Most of that sprinting success, though, was earned a while back:

So chalk that up for sprinting being a bit harder as you get older, I suppose.

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2012 05 02 Joran Analysis
Career Retrospective
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