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The Belarussians Are Mysterious

FasterSkier’s piece on Belarus over the weekend naturally got me thinking about their performances. As they note in that article, they’ve had some wild times, including the famous “lucky” silver medal by Leanid Karneyenka in 2007 thanks to an early start position and a freak snowstorm, and their mishap in the team sprint relay in Vancouver, and then Sergei Dolidovich’s near miss in the 50k this past season in Oslo.

Here’s what I see when I look at their men’s distance results: Continue reading ›

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2011 11 04 Joran Cross Country Comments (0) Permalink

Lithuania And Co.

In the same vein as my previous post following up on Spain’s WC prospects, the FasterSkier series next looked at Lithuania. I’m sometimes curious why some of the former Soviet republics aren’t better represented in cross country skiing. I imagine many of them have struggled economically since the breakup of the USSR and national sports programs wouldn’t be a priority in that case. (I don’t know anything about Lithuania’s economy, for the record. Update: An actual Lithuanian has popped by in the comments to other their own insights.)

But whatever the reason, Lithuania is sort of a prototypical example of the former Soviet republic. For instance, by far the best Lithuanian skier that I can find in their history (post-Soviet era) is (was) Vida Venzene. And she was a rather talented Soviet skier who switched to her native Lithuania once they became independent. So a lot of these new nations inherited some great skiers (Vladimir Smirnov, anyone?) but suddenly cut off economically from Russia some of them haven’t been able rebuild their own program.

The only three Lithuanian skiers that I can find who have recorded top 30 results are Venzene, Ricardas Panavas and Irina Terentjeva. Terentjeva’s Wikipedia page is out of date, as she has had a few top 30 results since the 37th listed there as her best result.

But as with Laura Orgue in my last post, there’s reason for concern when looking at Teretjeva’s results:

Her median distance result (in blue) has been up and down over the years. But what stands out to me is the steady decline in her best result over the past five years or so. Her sprint results don’t reveal an encouraging trend either: Continue reading ›

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2011 11 02 Joran Cross Country Comments (4) Permalink

Spain And Laura Orgue

I love the annual series FasterSkier does profiling each nation that scored nation’s cup points in the days before the World Cup begins. Usually by the time they reach Norway and Russia, I’m actually less interested, but the first week or so is a fun ride through nations with tiny, little known programs.

First up was Spain, featuring Laura Orgue. The correctly note that she’s basically the only real prospect they have, and thankfully she’s not terribly old (~25). What can happen a lot with these tiny ski programs (or even medium sized ones, really, like the US) is they latch onto a decent skier and basically ride them into their 40’s. However, looking at Orgue’s last few seasons, I’m a little concerned:

No one’s pretending that Orgue has been anything other than a middle of the pack type of distance skier, but I’m worried that her results have plateaued a bit, perhaps even tailing off last season. In my experience looking at skier’s results, after the early rapid improvement, they often hit a plateau. But each year they spend stuck at that level decreases the chances that they’ll start improving again. The clock is ticking, so to speak.

As for the men, the FasterSkier profile if anything underplays the comical contrast of with and without Johann Mühlegg: Continue reading ›

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2011 10 31 Joran Cross Country Comments (2) Permalink

Sprint Qualification Pacing Analysis

I’ll be the first to admit that sprinting doesn’t get as much love here at Statistical Skier.  To be honest, that’s probably my subconscious at work, as I have a stronger connection to distance events I suppose.  But it’s not terribly fair, so here is some World Cup sprint qualification analysis for all you sprint lovers out there.

The first step to success in sprinting is qualifying for the elimination rounds.[1. Everyone skis the course one at a time, i.e. the qualification round, and then the top 30 move on to elimination heats of 6 at a time or so.]  So I thought it might be fun to look at what sorts of efforts it takes to qualify in a World Cup sprint race (and any trends or patterns that might arise).

We’re going to do this using two measures: percent back and pace (seconds/km).  Using pace means we’re implicitly assuming that the courses are measured accurately, which probably has not always been the case.  Just for starters, the skier’s times are measured to the tenth of a second, but the length of the courses is typically only reported to the nearest 100m.  And it takes a bit more than a few tenths of a second to ski 100m.  Also, we should keep in mind that there can be pretty extreme variations in course design and weather/snow conditions.  So keeping all that in mind, let’s dive in…

Continue reading ›

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2011 10 28 Joran Analysis
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Male Long Distance Specialists

Continuing on from last time, we take a look at male long distance specialists. Recall I’m being all “fancy” here and using a fairly sophisticated modeling technique to identify skiers who tended to have better major international results at longer distances.

If you’re familiar with any statistics, you can think of it as an extension of a linear regression model, where we’re estimating a coefficient for each skier that (hopefully) captures the effect of race length on their individual results. As before, we’ll focus in on those for whom the model identified at least a nominally “significant” effect: Continue reading ›

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2011 10 26 Joran Analysis
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First World Cup Race Results!

In alpine racing, that is! Fooled you, didn’t I?

Like I said before, I’m not going to make a habit of posting about alpine racing, but since the season opener went fairly well for the US, I thought I might as well. So here are two race snapshot graphs, similar to those I’ve been making for cross country races, although a little less tricked out. The bars represent the middle 50% of that skier’s results over the past three seasons, in this event. (Giant slalom, in this case.) The red dot is their FIS points for the race this weekend. As always, the aim is to give a quick visual representation of who skied better or worse than usual.

And the men: Continue reading ›

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2011 10 24 Joran Alpine
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Female Long Distance Specialist – Majdic Follow-Up

A commenter noted that it was interesting that Petra Majdic showed up as being “statistically significantly” better at longer distance races (as opposed to sprint races), although just barely.

It turns out this is a good example of the statistical concept of leverage. Check out the following graph that compares skiers at each end of the statistically significant group I highlighted in my last post:

Johaug was near the top of the list and Majdic just barely snuck in at the bottom. What’s going on here is that the “standard” distances, 10-15km don’t have much of an effect on the model. But really short distances (5k or Prologues) and really long distances (30km and up) exert more leverage on the regression line.

So Johaug hasn’t done terribly well in Prologues, but has done well in 30k’s. Conversely, Majdic doesn’t have quite as extreme a split between those two race lengths. It is true that basically all of Majdic’s results at 30km+ are classic races (big surprise!) and she is quite the classic specialist. So it could be that despite attempting to control for technique in my model I haven’t quite entirely removed technique as a confounding factor in Majdic’s case.

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2011 10 21 Joran Analysis
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