Statistical Skier

A quick look at our lovely neighbors to the north!

I’m going to focus on the folks on the World Cup squad, starting with the men:

These are the WC level distance results (excluding Len Valjas). I confess I’m a little worried about Ivan Babikov, who had a rough season last year. His trend over the past four seasons appears to be headed in the wrong direction (albeit very slightly); we’ll see if he can rebound for some strong freestyle results this year.

Alex Harvey had an interesting season last year, and he’s still quite young. Given his age and how competitive he seemed in distance races last year at times, he’s the North American skier I’m most excited about at the moment. (Yes, even more than Kikkan Randall.)

Devon Kershaw also had a strong season last year, particularly in the Tour de Ski. One thing I wonder about is how well he’s been able to figure out travelling back and forth to Europe. My only reason for saying that is the odd ‘clustering’ effect you can see in the last three seasons of his distance results. They each show two distinct groups of results, one very strong cluster and one more mediocre cluster. For instance, last year he seemed to fade into March. What I’m keeping my eye on with him is consistency, then. Can he sustain those top level results through an entire season?

The women are more focused on sprinting: Continue reading ›

I’m continuing to pick and choose which nations in Fasterskier’s countdown to write about. The US and Canada I’ll cover later in more detail, and I’m written about Japan a fair bit in the past.

A couple of comments in their write up about Kazahkstan stuck out to me. The first was the comment about Alexey Poltaranin being the next Vladimir Smirnov. (I realize their posts are written partly in fun, and not always entirely seriously.) This is hard for me to assess with data, since so much of Smirnov’s younger days took place prior to 1992. But here’s a rough comparison of their major international results by age, using standardized percent behind the median skier:

While that seems to suggest a smooth transition, keep the x axis scales in mind. There’s a 3 year gap there. Also, be careful about trends at the end points, since age can be split across two different seasons, as in Poltaranin’s case. One little exercise for you is this: carefully cover up Poltaranin’s one excellent race from last year (his best). How much is that one point influencing the visual impression of a steady improvement?

The other skier mentioned that caught my eye was Anastasia Slonova, who’s had some strong results as a junior. Although, I only have 29 FIS races on record for her including both sprint and distance events. She hasn’t had any stellar results yet in the handful of WC’s that she’s done, topping out at around 40th or so. But she is still quite young.

If you look at her cohort graph, that compares her FIS points to women who went on to record a top ten finish in a WC race, you see that she’s mostly on track in distance events:

So her distance FIS points are right in the middle of where you want to be if you’re aiming for WC success.

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