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Can Bjørgen Repeat Her Dominant Performance?

Marit Bjørgen pretty much wiped the floor with folks last year in distance events:

As a stats guy, when I see extreme events I tend not to expect them to repeat themselves. The general principle here is called regression to the mean. Extreme events are just unlikely, so it doesn’t make sense to expect them to happen repeatedly. From a numbers perspective, Bjørgen’s season was pretty much unrivaled, so if I were a betting man I’d wager that she won’t be as dominant next year.

At the very least, I wouldn’t expect her to win by a consistently large margins over the field, even if she actually wins nearly as many races. But you never know!

When people have had extremely good seasons in the past, sometimes they can sustain is for a few years in a row, other times not. For example, here are some examples of some men who had a strong season but weren’t really able to sustain that level: Continue reading ›

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2011 09 16 Joran Analysis
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Female Participation Over Time

On Monday I looked at the ratio of women to men in FIS races during the 2010-2011 season. This will just be a quick update on that to look at the same data, but over time.

The same caveats apply here. I’m only looking at participants in FIS sanctioned races, which misses lots of races in various countries. Indeed, some countries are probably more likely to have lots of FIS races than others, so comparisons between countries should be taken with a grain of salt. Given these caveats, changes over (reasonably short) periods of time can be interesting:

Sweden is nice and steady. Finland has apparently seen a steady increase in the ratio of women to men recently. Interestingly, Russia has seen a bit of a decline. As for the US and Canada: Continue reading ›

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2011 09 14 Joran Analysis
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Female Participation In Skiing

Fast and Female is a great organization, operating mainly in the US and Canada to promote women’s participation in skiing (or sports, more generally). I’ve been thinking about women’s participation in sports recently, so I thought I’d look up some data.

Using all FIS sanctioned races from the 2010-2011, the following graph shows the ratio of the total number of women to men for each nation that I have a record of racing last season. The bars are colored according to the total number of skiers, men or women, since many nations have only a few skiers.

Obviously, women’s races generally tend to have fewer participants all over. But notice that the US actually does pretty well in terms of the ratio of women to men participating. Of course, this only counts FIS races, which is a big omission. This doesn’t count small, local non-FIS races. Still, this is probably indicative of something at least somewhat relevant to female participation rates. However, it will also inevitably be correlated with how many FIS races a nation holds. So don’t get all mad at countries like Serbia or Greece over this (and, conversely, don’t assume that Kyrgyzstan (or China!) is some sort of sports gender equality utopia.

Note how many total skiers Norway has, but how disproportionately male they are. And of course, basically all the ratios are far too short of 1 for my taste.

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2011 09 12 Joran Cross Country Comments (3) Permalink

French Men Without Vittoz

I’m really sad that Vincent Vittoz retired, mainly because I really, really wanted him to win an Olympic medal. The French men are left with two guys who are pretty well established:

These graphs show only their major international results (WC, WSC, etc.). Manificat’s stupendous win in 2010 is looking more and more like an outlier, sadly. Gaillard is over thirty now, so I sort of doubt he’ll race for more than one more Olympic cycle.

Here’s a collection of some of the better young French distance skiers (not necessarily exhaustive), using FIS points as a measure (click for full version): Continue reading ›

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2011 09 09 Joran Cross Country Comments (0) Permalink

Erling Jevne Follow Up

A commenter noted a few other classic specialists in my post on Erling Jevne the other day. So how did they fare against Jevne?

It’s generally important to note here that my data stops in 1992, and several of these folks were active before then. In Kirvesniemi’s case, way before. Jevne and Sture Sirvetsen were probably the most consistently evenly matched, though Jevne seemed to have the edge for all but the earlier years. Kirvesniemi was pretty evenly matched against Jevne until around 1996, and then didn’t fare so well at all until his “miraculous resurgence”. Gandler was definitely up and down. He had a handful of strong seasons against Jevne, but wasn’t very consistent.

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2011 09 07 Joran Analysis
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Erling Jevne: The Greatest Classic Specialist?

Erling Jevne wasn’t the best skier during his era, having to compete with folks like Dæhlie and Smirnov among others. And he wasn’t even the best classic skier, most likely. At least, he was still mostly losing to those two guys even in classic races:

Jevne fared better post-1997, but Dæhlie always had at least a slight edge, and Smirnov only faltered significantly in 1997. Indeed, Jevne’s 1997 campaign was notable: Continue reading ›

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2011 09 05 Joran Analysis
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The Veerpalu Saga Ends (For Now)

With the recent news that Andrus Veerpalu’s doping suspension has been made official, a sad story sort of ends. I’m always glad to see doping rules enforced, but it’s also not the way I want to hear about my favorite sport in the news.

Over the years, Veerpalu has raced against many people:

Name Number of Races
MAE Jaak 138
FREDRIKSSON Mathias 110
DI CENTA Giorgio 106
BATORY Ivan 102
BAUER Lukas 94
PILLER COTTRER Pietro 94
VITTOZ Vincent 92
HJELMESET Odd-Bjoern 90
VALBUSA Fulvio 90
SCHLUETTER Andreas 89
SOMMERFELDT Rene 88
FILBRICH Jens 82
BAJCICAK Martin 81
IMAI Hiroyuki 80
TEICHMANN Axel 79
HASLER Markus 78
ESTIL Frode 76
ANGERER Tobias 75
AUKLAND Anders 71
EBISAWA Katsuhito 70

 

 

Of the folks he’s raced against the most, the following graph shows how each has fared, overall:

Negative values (left) mean that skier tended to fare better against Veerpalu, and vice versa. We’ll probably never know how much Veerpalu cheated, exactly when, or for how long. But the folks who raced against him a lot whom he often beat (e.g. Hjelmeset, Sommerfeldt) are probably wondering.

For the record, I’ve posted plenty of times on Veerpalu in the past.

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2011 09 02 Joran Cross Country Comments (0) Permalink