Statistical Skier

Check yesterday’s post for graphs focusing on the North Americans. But for the moment let’s focus on the rest of the race, starting with the men’s finalists:

Sprint times again provided by Jan at WorldOfX.com. The times kind of bounced around in this race. Normally the men’s qualification round is somewhat faster than this, relative to the times for the whole day. This might be related to either the course or the fact that in a WSC race you actually have a slightly weaker field due to the big nations (Norway, Sweden, etc.) being limited to only entering 4-5 athletes.

In either case, we have Jesper Modin again putting in a strong performance early, only to fade by the finals (but at least not finishing last in the final like he has so many times before this season). Still, Modin I think has gone somewhat overlooked among sprinters this season. He always seems to be there, he just needs to get his stamina up a bit so he can be more competitive late in the day.

Notice Northug skiing steadily faster through each round, while the others bounce around a bit. Hellner and Jönsson skiing fast in the quarters, then lucking into a slow, slow semi and then of course turning it on again in the finals.

As you can probably guess, there was a huge difference in the two semifinals: Continue reading ›

Wow, what a bummer of a day for Kikkan! But that’s sprint racing; everyone who makes it to the finals relies on at least a little bit of luck.

Continue reading ›

Following up on the previous post looking at distance results, the same graphs for the sprinters. Obviously, sprinting hasn’t been around as long and there’s typically only one sprint race per championship event, so “results per race” is kind of a silly metric to use, but whatever.

There’s a lot less to say here, so I’ll let you provide your own commentary. First the men:

Go Russian sprinters! Now for the women:

I’m not going to spend much time on this topic, since obviously it wasn’t a great day for the North Americans, but we can at least put a few of the results in some sort of context using my new-fangled graph, starting with some of the men:

I’m sticking with the folks who’ve done more races, here, just to keep things brief. As I mentioned before, I’m plotting the standardized percent back from the median skier, with Saturday’s classic race highlighted with the blue circle. The blue line marks the median trend (by season) over time, except for seasons with fewer than two distance races. In Harvey’s case, I don’t think that race was all that bad, just not spectacular. Kershaw definitely was a bit below where he normally is, though.

Here’s the corresponding graph for (a few of) the women:

Actually, Crawford and Gaiazova’s races weren’t too bad, compared to how they’ve done in the past.