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Top Male Juniors

I use the term ‘Junior’ fairly loosely here. Mainly I’m referring to folks who are young enough to be at the very start of their (hopefully long) career. I basically just grabbed the names of the skiers with some of the best FIS points results last season who are no older than ~23 (although that’s approximate). In some cases I removed a ‘young’ skier who was accomplished enough already that they didn’t seem to fit in with the others (e.g. Charlotte Kalla).

Here are 10 of the top male distance skiers:

You have the true phenom Petr Sedov, who is notable to me not just for his good results, but how uniformly good they have been. Only Belov displays a similar level of consistency, I think. Nearly everyone else has some very good results, but also a fair bit of variation over all. Calle Halfvarsson actually had a fair number of weaker races last season (but also plenty of good ones) although I think he may be more of a sprinter. Poltaranin is another guy who didn’t have quite as strong a season as the previous two. Two names that weren’t particularly on my radar screen are Dotzler and Tammjarv.

As for sprinting, I’m going to also use plain old FIS points, so obviously there are even more grains of salt to be had here: Continue reading ›

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2011 08 15 Joran Cross Country Comments (2) Permalink

Is Sprinting A Young Person’s Game?

Conventional wisdom (and probably a fair bit of physiology research) holds that going fast over short distances is a skill we tend to lose as we age.  Are fast World Cup sprinters younger than fast distance skiers?

Let’s look at the age distributions of top thirty racers in sprinting and distance races since the 2003-2004 season:

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2011 08 12 Joran Analysis
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Younger USST Member Tracking

The USST has expanded somewhat, adding several younger skiers. Acknowledging that FIS points are only a small piece of performance assessment, it has interested me that at various times USST staff have mentioned comparing skiers’ FIS points to medalists, or some other group of top skiers. So here are two graphs showing the younger US B Team members compared to the range of FIS point results by future top ten WC finishers at that age. First the women:

The blue line is the athlete’s median FIS points by age and the shaded regions shows the range of FIS points earned by future top ten skiers, ranging from the best 10% to the worst 90%, the lightest shaded region. And similarly, the men: Continue reading ›

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2011 08 10 Joran Analysis
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Head-to-Head: Mika Myllylae vs. Thomas Alsgaard

I haven’t done one of these in a while, but with Mika Myllylae in the news recently I thought this might be fun…

This head-to-head matchup might not be the first you’d think of to look at, but you end up with an interesting graph nonetheless.  As always, I grabbed the 54 races where Myllylae (FIN) and Alsgaard (NOR) raced against each other directly in WC, OWG or WSC races.  Since these guys are both largely pre-sprinting era skiers, we’ll only look at distance races.

Then we simply plot the difference in FIS points between the skiers:

Remember that since lower FIS points are better, positive values represent a win for Alsgaard and negative values represent a win for Myllylae.  Each skier had their strengths, eh?  Alsgaard, true to form, kicked Myllylae’s arse in skating during the first half of the 90’s and Myllylae correspondingly kicked Alsgard’s butt in classic races.

But then they each significantly improved their weak techniques (since it doesn’t make much sense that they would both get worse at they better techniques) until they reached some level of parity by the end of the decade.  The actual reversal of the trend lines here is somewhat misleading, most likely an artifact of the small number of races in 2000 and 2001.

Just a simple picture of two somewhat one sided skiers becoming considerably less one sided.

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2011 08 08 Joran Cross Country
Fun Stuff
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The Hot Hand (con’t)

In a previous post I raised the question of whether biathletes might be more likely to shoot clean (i.e. hit all five targets) if they have just shot clean at their most recent trip through the shooting range.

I left off with some numbers that suggested this was the case, but they were aggregated over all athletes.  So when we conditioned on ‘shooting clean’ we ended up with a group of skiers that were simply better shots.  What we need to do is calculate these probabilities for each individual athlete.

First a quick review to get us all up to speed:

  • Biathletes alternately ski and shoot
  • Depending on the type of race, the sequence of shooting stages may be one of Prone-Standing, Prone-Standing-Prone-Standing or Prone-Prone-Standing-Standing.
  • Each shooting stage involves shooting at five targets
  • Shooting standing is much harder than shooting prone

Because of that last point, we can’t simply look at the probability someone shoots clean given that they just shot clean, since it will make a big difference depending on whether that sequence of stages is Prone-Standing, Standing-Standing, etc.

I took all the records for biathletes in major international races that I have back to around 1991 and then tossed anyone with fewer than 50 races.  For each athlete, I calculated six probabilities:

  • Probability of shooting clean prone
  • Probability of shooting clean standing
  • Conditional probabilities of shooting clean in each of the four possible shooting stage sequences: Prone-Standing, Prone-Prone, Standing-Prone and Standing-Standing

For instance, the Prone-Standing conditional probability represents the proportion of times that that athlete shot clean at a standing stage when their previous shooting stage (within that same race) was prone and they shot clean there as well.

Here’s a graph of the results.  It’s a bit complicated to read, so I’ll walk you through it… Continue reading ›

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2011 08 05 Joran Analysis
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The Hot Hand

The concept of a “hot hand” is a popular one in various sports, and has been variously bunked, debunked and rebunked in numerous contexts.  A common manifestation of this idea comes from basketball, where fans routinely feel that players will get “hot” during a stretch of a game during which they make a much higher percentage of their shots than their career average would suggest is likely.

Whether this actually happens is debatable.  It’s harder to nail this down than you might think, and numerous people have thrown a fair amount of sophisticated statistics and computing resources at it in baseball and basketball.  My understanding of the current state of things is that the “hot hand” effect is generally thought to be dubious, but that there are legitimate questions about whether some of the naysayer’s assumptions are valid[1. Independence, mainly.  Are baseball/basketball games independent?  Are shots/at-bats independent?].

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2011 08 03 Joran Analysis
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Competitiveness Trends

With Marit Bjørgen (and only a handful of others) dominating the women’s WC circuit last season, I thought I’d check out how this compared to past seasons. I took all WC, OWG, WSC and TDS races for each season and counted the number of distinct skiers finishing at four different levels: 1st, top 3, top 15 and top 30. What follows is a graph of the normalized values:

Increasing values here represent more different skiers finishing at that level. Note that the Winner and Top 3 lines have taken a major tumble for the women, particularly in distance events. That’s about what we’d expect given the seasons that Bjørgen, Kowalczyk and Johaug have had recently.

Note that overall, the long term trend appears to be towards more skiers vying for the top spots across the board. However, I haven’t adjusted for something important, the number of races per season. Since the early 90’s there’s been a steady increase in the number of distance races per season, and a dramatice increase in the number of sprint races. More races leads to skiers attending a smaller proportion of the schedule, which in turn will lead to more different people winning, being on the podium, etc. What happend when we adjust for this?

The upward trend for the sprints has basically entirely disappeared, and in fact things have gotten somewhat less competitive with the women it appears. Interestingly, the women’s distance panel still shows a dramatic dropoff in the last two seasons but historically has been fairly stable, while the men’s distance events appears to still show a generally upward trend until around 2007 or so. Since then we seem to have seen a rather dramatic fall in overall competitiveness. Tour de Ski is a tempting explanation, but remember I’ve already adjusted for the increased number of races, so something else is probably happening here.

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2011 08 01 Joran Analysis
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