Statistical Skier

I got an interesting question from a reader the other day that I though I’d follow up on:

As you know, the winners of all the continental cups gets to start the World Cup season. There are also intermediate rankings during the season that allows the current continental cup leaders to join the WC’s. My son , the skier, was wondering if you could do a comparison of how well the leaders and winners of continental cups fare when on the WC circuit? More specifically, how do Canada’s and the USA’s leaders and winners WC results compare to other continental cup skiers? Or have you already done this and I have missed the post?

So, this is harder to examine directly than it might seem, mostly due to the availability of data. FIS isn’t in the habit of publishing lists of Continental Cup leaders someplace that remains accessible for more than a year or so. (At least, not to my knowledge. If anyone knows of such a series of lists, I’d be happy to take a look.)

In particular, the starts awarded to the intermediate leaders during a season will be the hardest to track. Also, there’s the issue that sometimes the nominal Continental Cup leader may decline the starts, or be ineligible (wrong nation of origin) so you’d have to filter out those cases too.

To avoid getting lost in the technicalities of Continental Cups, let’s look at something that’s pretty close to the original question: take the top three skiers in each Continental Cup series at the end of a season, and look at how they did in the 1st period World Cup races the following season.

This will allow us to address the question of how the “best” Continental Cup skiers from different regions compare on the WC, without getting bogged down in too many details.

The following graph shows the median result for an aggregated collection of Continental Cup series:

Even though I’ve expanded this to the top three, rather than just the winner, it’s important to note that these results will be very strongly influenced by a single very strong skier from a particular region (I’m thinking Justyna Kowalczyk here, but there are other examples).

But this also means that it’s tough to glean any general trend, since the results from any particular region will be so strongly dependent on whether they happen to have a “super star” that year or not.

That said, I do think it’s clear that the Scandinavian and OPA Cup skiers are generally stronger on the men’s side. The women’s field, not surprisingly, is a little more mixed. The recent good fortunes among the women’s UST/NAC skiers is probably in large part to Jessie Diggins/Holly Brooks.

These are definitely less pleasant posts to write, but part of any season assessment should include what went wrong as well as what went right.

Once again, you can refer to my initial post in this series for an explanation of the general methodology.

That said, here’s the twelve men who took the biggest slide in distance events this season, compared to last:

Daniel Rickardsson didn’t exactly have terrible results this year, but after several years of steady improvement 2012 just didn’t include the top level results we’d seen from him last year. You’ll note that, with two lone exceptions, he really didn’t have any truly bad races compared to his general range in the past. But he was apparently just lacking that top gear this season.

Nikolay Chebotko’s appearance on this list is something of an aberration, as it’s mostly due to an unusual set of races last season. Notice that this year’s results aren’t terribly different than what we’d seen from him in 2008-2010. Algo Karp is probably a similar case here.

In the “truly dramatic decline” category I’d probably include Curdin Perl and possibly Petter Eliassen. Perl obviously had an unusually good season last year, so some regression was probably to be expected, but he definitely fell back below where he’d been before. Eliassen is a more ambiguous case, since he has less of a racing history on the WC level.

Franz Goering also didn’t have a great season, but his was mostly a case of a lack of consistency. Four of his races were roughly on par with his past, but then his other five were all over the map.

Tom Reichelt is a marginal inclusion here, probably, mostly due to fewer truly exceptional races compared to last season.

Pietro Piller Cottrer, Fulvio Scola and Kris Freeman all strike me as somewhat similar in that I see a slow steady decline across multiple seasons. Granted, Freeman’s trend is only 2 seasons long, while the Italians have been nursing their’s for longer. But I will be particularly curious what Piller Cottrer’s future looks like. I’m not sure if he’s planning on sticking around until Sochi or not.

Let’s start wrapping up the 2011-2012 World Cup season, shall we? First, we’ll look at skiers who made the largest jumps, either up or down, compared to last year, beginning with the men’s distance events.

As always, you get somewhat different lists of skiers as the “most improved” depending on what metric you use. My calculations actually combine 4 different measurements (finishing place, FIS points, percent behind median skier, and another more aggressively scaled version of the median percent back). But I can only really plot one at a time, so I’m only going to show you the graphs of percent behind the median skier for each athlete. Also, I’ve scaled all the metrics so that improvements at different levels are roughly comparable (i.e. improving from 10th to 5th versus from 40th to 20th). It’s a little more democratic that way.

My other reminder is that there are several ways in which a skier could “improve” in a numerical sense: their typical, or average result could improve, they could have more really good results, or they could have fewer really bad results. Not all of those are guaranteed to happen at the same time. Here we go:

You can click through for a slightly larger version of that graph. Note that each panel has its own y-axis, in order to better see the scale change for each skier.

Calle Halfvarsson stands out as someone I noticed having an unusually good distance season. Of course, Sergey Turyshev 4 results that were head and shoulders above anything he’s done previously, so he takes the crown this year. Kristian Rennemo is a more pedestrian skier, generally speaking, but in addition to one extraordinary race (5th in the Tour de Ski pursuit) his median result also jumped considerably.

Hannes Dotzler didn’t race all that much, but went rather dramatically faster when he did. Andy Kuehne and Dmitriy Japarov are similar cases in that neither has many seasons under their belt, and had wildly variable, though much improved on average, results. Japarov in particular was sort of all over the map.

Johannes Duerr (along with Bernhard Tritscher, who’s more of a sprinter) is handily Austria’s top male distance skier his age (~25). He looks to still have a ways to go if he’s going to be a serious competitor on the World Cup level, though.

Then you have four top guys: Olsson, Northug, Cologna and Poltaranin. After two somewhat subpar years, Olsson rebounded somewhat and probably could have had a spectacular year if he’d stayed healthy. Similarly, Northug was really the only person who could have given Cologna a run for the World Cup overall, but he focused on different events, and eventually lost a good portion of the season to illness as well. But recall that in November and December he was skiing rather well.

Finally, there’s Andrew Newell, possibly an interesting inclusion in this list. Obviously, he’s more of a sprint specialist, but he did quite a few distance events this season (in part due to the Tour de Ski). While he’s not exactly a superstar in distance events, he did manage to have more strong results this season than last. Although, the overall range in his results isn’t all that different.