Statistical Skier

The never ending question! A commenter asked about this the other day, and I’m happy to oblige, despite the fact that I’ve covered this general topic several times before.

The difficulties with extrapolating from WJC results start with the fact that they comprise at most 2-3 races from a skier’s entire season. And the posts I mentioned above go into quite some detail looking at trends and correlations. And I think it’s fair to say that there is a relationship between strong WJC results and future success at the World Cup level. But there are precise relationships and noisy relationships:

Both of the panels above display precisely the same relationship between these two variables. One of them is much more useful for making predictions than the other, though. My general position is that WJC results are certainly correlated with future World Cup success, but that that correlation is so noisy that isn’t of much use on its own.

To drive this home, I thought we’d take a little trip down memory lane. Specifically, let’s roll back the clock a decade to World Junior Championships in 2002. That year 9 men and 8 women achieved a podium result at that event. I’ve sifted through those folks’ results and I’m going to show you a roughly representative sample of what’s happened to them since.

Let’s start with four of the men: Continue reading ›

World Junior/U23s are underway, of course, in the exotic locale of Turkey. Monday wasn’t a spectacular day for the North Americans in the WJC freestyle sprint. For some quick context, here’s a look at the historical results in each discipline for the US:

I’m just using finishing place here, rather than FIS points, since I think that’s often more understandable for people with World Juniors. Obviously, the first distance races were this morning (I wrote this last night) so I’ll update those on Friday.

As you can see, while the men didn’t have a great day, they really haven’t qualified more than 1-2 skiers in a long time. So while it’s not great, it doesn’t seem dramatically different from what we’ve seen over the past 5-6 years. What I notice with the women is that we’ve actually seen 3 straight years of declining results. While the median result this year isn’t much different than last, the top result has steadily decline.

And of course, here’s the same graph for the Canadians: Continue reading ›