Statistical Skier

Once again nothing spectacular from the North Americans, but nothing truly horrible either. Here are the Americans:

That’s a pretty average race for Freeman. His best efforts this season have been just above -2, which would likely have just put him in the top ten today, and I mean that literally: he would have been 10th. So if you are inclined to give much credence to these kinds of comparisons (and let’s face it, this is wild-ass speculation) even if Freeman had put in an effort as good as anything he’s done this season, it probably wouldn’t have netted him a medal. Hoffman however, had a fairly strong race for him, as did Lars Flora.

Turning to the Canadians, who were resting Harvey and Kershaw for the team sprint:

Sadly, another terrible race for George Grey, even compared to his pre-2009 self. Babikov had a decent day, especially considering that he’s typically better in skating events. And I suppose this means Len Valjas probably has won the relay team start sweepstakes? We’ll see…

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I noticed an interesting tidbit in a FasterSkier article the other day previewing today’s men’s 15km classic race. Towards the end, it mentioned that “Bauer also often does better in his first event in a major event.”

Obviously, Bauer had a pretty bad race today, his first of the event, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have a streak going before this. That would be fairly interesting, so I thought I’d look up some data. Prior to this season, Bauer has participated in multiple races at 10 different championship events (WSC or OWG) dating back to 1998.

The following graph shows his results relative to his first race in each event, as measured by finishing place:

If Bauer tended to ski better in his first event in a major championship, we would expect most of the lines to travel above zero (blue line) as we move to the right. Instead, things are quite mixed. There are two instances where Bauer’s second race was much, much worse than his first (2005, 2009 WSC). But overall,there are five cases where Bauer went on to ski better than his first race and five times when he did not.

Just to check, here’s the same graph but instead of using finishing place, using difference in percent back from the median skier (standardized): Continue reading ›

Another race, another win for Marit Bjørgen, although Justyna Kowalczyk certainly came pretty close this time. And a dominant showing by the Norwegian and Finnish women in general, as they made up 8 of the top 10. Here’s some perspective on the performances by the top six women (click through for full version):

This measure I’m plotting does a pretty good job of capturing to quality of race efforts relative to a reasonably consistent benchmark, but you can only control how fast you ski. So Kowalczyk, Saarinen and Johaug continue to lay down fairly impressive efforts, both in an absolute sense and relative to their past performance, but Bjørgen just keeps skiing even faster. What can you do?

Saarinen really does seem to be back in form, as that was easily her best race of the season thus far. It’s nice to see Krista Lahteenmaki rebound from her abysmal day on Saturday at the pursuit with a career race. You may recall that Lahteenmaki actually finished 2nd on the second day of the Tour back in January, but this is measuring how fast she skied relative to the median skier and by that measure performance far outpaced that one.

But the award for “race of her life” among the top skiers has to go to Pirjo Muranen. While Lahteenmaki is young and has shown amazing promise this season, Muranen has been racing for quite some time and so has had many more opportunities to have the occasional amazing race. Mostly, she’s just been solid or decent, and this season she hasn’t actually raced all that much on the World Cup circuit, which makes me wonder if she’s had illness or injury issues.

Having four Norwegian women in the top ten isn’t that unusual, but having four Finnish women in the top ten is very rare. I checked women’s results from 1992 onward and I could only find one other major international race (WC, WSC, OWG or TdS) with four Finnish women in the top ten, a 10km TdS pursuit in December 2008. As you might imagine, the Russian women have managed this many times (>100 times, actually, though not often recently) and the Norwegian women have done it 40 times. As far as I can tell, only Germany and Italy have also managed this type of team performance, but not Sweden, interestingly.

As for the North Americans, it was about as good as you could expect: Continue reading ›

Just to follow up from my previous post, here’s a look at a few other women who had particularly good or bad days on Saturday:

I suspected that Nicole Fessel would have some strong races this week and this was certainly a good one. There were just too many people who skied faster. After a blistering start to the season, Krista Lahteenmaki really struggled on Saturday with what is easily her worst race of the season. Similarly, Arianna Follis had a pretty terrible day. On the other hand, Saarinen actually had a fairly decent race compared to the rest of her season; unfortunately her injuries this year have made this season a bit below what she expects.

I suspect that Bjørgen will continue to streamroll through these races, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of notable performances taking place behind her!