Statistical Skier

Looks like it was some tough shooting, particularly for the women’s race. The percent back values look a little odd, even for a mass start race.

I managed to post a fair bit this week, though not today really, despite being out of town. Thanks again to Skaði Nordic for sponsoring Week In Review.

• With Nordic World Championships wrapping up and biathlon World Championships getting under way we had a ton of racing: the women’s 30k, the men’s 50km, biathlon sprint (men and women), biathlon pursuit (men and women), biathlon individual (men and women).
• We looked at some brief recaps for some of these races, including the men’s 50km, the women’s 30km, the men’s and women’s biathlon sprint, the men’s and women’s pursuit.
• I took a a quick look at how the Americans and Canadians did at WSC’s compared to past major events.
• In response to a commenter, we looked at how much progress the women’s field has made recently in terms of shooting.
• Finally, I noted a few notably extreme performances so far at these World Biathlon Championships.

A commenter yesterday noted that the TV coverage of yesterday’s women’s WBC race noted that the women’s shooting has been improving over the last decade or so, and wondered if we could make a graph to go along with that observation.

Looking at only World Cup, World Championship and Olympic races, here’s the shooting statistics for men and women by season:

Shooting accuracy for all men and women for each season.

As you can see, the shooting data for the 1997-1998 season are missing (they’re missing on the IBU website). The men’s field has been quite stable since 1992 at just under 80% overall. The women’s field has clearly improved significantly since the early 90’s and perhaps modestly since the early 00’s as well. Interestingly, the entire women’s field’s shooting seems to have dipped downward slightly this season.

Those values cover the entire field, which includes every skier in every race. This captures a lot of not very good biathletes (relatively speaking, of course) who may have only done 1-2 races, so just for fun let’s restrict ourselves to individuals who’ve had at least 200 shots in a season: Continue reading ›

Nothing in depth here, just a quick look at how the US and Canadian results at these past World Champs compare to past major championships (OWG and WSC). First is a look at the distance results, using standardized percent back from the median skier, and the blue line representing the median performance over time:

For the US women, their best performances weren’t much better than recently, but their median result did improve somewhat. That would point to a slightly deeper squad, if not a faster one.

Despite no big headline results from Kris Freeman, the US men still had a better showing than Vancouver, and a better team performance than the previous WSC (minus a good result from Freeman, of course).

The only modest improvement of the median result for the Canadian men is mostly the result of George Grey not skiing out of his brain like he did last year at the Olympics, and Kershaw getting sick and missing the 50k. He may not have been quite up with Harvey in that race, but I’d bet he he would have skied fairly well.

Not a terribly impressive WSCs from the Canadian women in the distance events. They’re still rebuilding and hopefully it won’t take too many more years.

The sprint version of these plots are a little silly, since there’s only one sprint race per event, so the amount of data is dramatically reduced. Still, for completeness and comparison: Continue reading ›