Statistical Skier

Ah, yes, another Olympic year, another wildly entertaining FasterSkier comment thread regarding team selection.

I find this round interesting because I sort of assumed that most of the heat this year would fall on the men’s selections, but apparently the decision to not select Caitlin Gregg is getting the bulk of the attention.

This is a singularly difficult thing to analyze, because there just isn’t much concrete data to go on. But let’s get a few things straight right up front. The selection criteria were clearly intended to not give special preference to people skiing fast just this fall. You really had to have had good points from last season as well, and some of the best opportunities for those points would have come at the spring races with the US women present (mostly).

There’s no question that reasonable people can disagree on whether this is the best strategy for a selection criteria, but I think it’s impossible to argue that its a bad idea, or even the worst idea. At best, you’re only going to see 7-8 starts from someone by early January, and when you consider someone like Gregg who you’d be taking primarily to ski a distance skate race, you really are only going to see 2-3 relevant results out of her in that time period. That’s not a lot to go on, really, and I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask that a major part of putting yourself on an Olympic team to be demonstrating that you can ski fast over a longer time period, and against relevant fields.

So let’s acknowledge that Caitlin hasn’t raced against anyone on the US team at all this season (except for the two recent sprints in Europe). What do we know about how she has stacked up against that particular group? If we take each head-to-head matchup between Gregg and one of Randall, Diggins, Bjornsen, Brooks, Caldwell and Sargent, Gregg compiled a 6-25 record in 2011-2012 and a 3-20 record in 2012-2013. Not surprisingly, in sprint races its even worse, with a 2-11 record in 2011-2012 and an 0-20 record in 2012-2013. In graphical form, that looks roughly like this:

Negative values are bad for Gregg here. Over the past two season, Holly has basically dominated Gregg overall. Brooks hasn’t skied all that well herself this year, and I think it’s clear that Gregg is skiing faster. Have they moved enough to swap places? Impossible to say, since they haven’t skied against each other yet.

Last season, basically all of those match ups (except against Brooks) came during  “Spring Series” (I’m honestly not sure if they still call it that, but I like the name) at which Gregg skied rather poorly. It’s quite possible that she was just unlucky, getting sick near those races, or maybe she just didn’t manage her fitness as well as she could have and went into the series a little run down. Who knows. Regardless, I feel like anyone looking at the selection criteria would have known that those races were going to be very, very important, both for potential points and for demonstrating an ability to ski toe-to-toe with the gals spending all year over in Europe. So that was clearly a missed opportunity.

So the record we do have from Gregg from 2011 through last spring has very little evidence that she was skiing very close to the level of the top US women in Europe. But then she shows up this fall and has clearly improved, winning or finishing on the podium of basically everything she enters. In particular, she crushed the field in both of the freestyle skate races, a 10k and a 20k mass start. Does that tell us anything meaningful?

It’s hard to say. Normally, I’d be very skeptical of reading much into a huge margin in a mass start race, since the in race dynamics can be so weird. Certainly, a good portion of that margin came from the field simply deciding they weren’t going to catch her and they started racing for second. But she won the 10k individual start in Yellowstone by a huge margin as well. My personal feeling is that while she was clearly the best skier on both days, I have a hard time putting much stock in the margin of victory. The Yellowstone race was an extremely early season event, and the other was a mass start.

And then there’s the problem that you just keep circling back to: the fact that the people she’s beating in those races themselves fare very poorly against the top US women. In those two skate races, the other top women (Patterson, Fitzgerald, Flowers, Brennan, Rorabaugh) all have pretty dismal records against the US Ski Team women themselves. Brennan skied well enough to earn herself a trip to Eurpoe, but even she went 12-40 against that group in 2012-2013 and only 2-18 so far this season.

And finally, two stellar races in the discipline you want her in isn’t much of a trend, really.

I realize as I’m writing this that I probably sound very negative about Gregg’s results this season. Actually, that’s not the case. I think it’s clear that she’s skiing considerably better than last year. I would have loved to have seen her selected and it would have been great to watch her ski in the 30k in Sochi. But the selection criteria made it pretty clear, I think, that relying on skiing fast this fall to get in was going to be long odds. A stronger signal would have been to put up some good results last spring against the other top US women head-to-head and then demonstrate you can sustain it when racing resumes the next fall.

I think it’s perfectly fair for people to react to Gregg’s non-selection with a cry of “What does it take?” The answer to that is complicated by the fact that the Olympics are such an emotionally charged event. The Games have symbolic and cultural importance for many people that really transcends the more mundane aspirations of a national skiing body (winning hardware). It’s frustrating, but I think it’s unfair to expect an organization like USSA,  whose mission really ought to be to do everything it can to win, now and in the future, to treat Olympic starts any differently than World Cup or World Championship starts. Still, as a fan, that can be tough to swallow.

Gregg’s been working a long time for this, she’s well known, and folks look up to her. Sending her to Sochi to race the 30k would certainly have been a big payoff for a lot of long, hard work, even if she isn’t likely to finish very high up the results, and even if, at ~34, she’s not likely to remain an elite racer for that much longer. But it would certainly make a lot of folks back home happy and excited about ski racing.

The counter-argument is that I think the folks running the US Ski Team want us all to dream bigger. The days of simply going to the Olympics, or simply getting the chance to race in Europe as a fitting reward to a long career are over. Qualifying for Olympic/World Champ teams, attaining first period WC start rights, are all just steps along the way. Worth celebrating, for sure, but no longer a career capping moment. I think on some level, they actually don’t want us to be aspiring to long, successful domestic racing careers capped off with a trip to a major event with middling results.

And I think that mostly people are ok with that message, and that we really are dreaming bigger. But when it comes to the Olympic Games, the cold hard reality of that message can really sting, since for so many the Olympics are just a different beast altogether.

I don’t really have an ending for all this, except to say that I’m excited that Caitlin Gregg is skiing so well this year, and that as an American I’m thrilled to see what results she can put up across the pond, Olympics or no.