Statistical Skier

Another down week with World Cup action on the cross-country side of things, but Drammen and World Champs are just around the corner.

• Last weekend saw the return of the Rybinsk World Cups, a pursuit and a sprint. We also had the first weekend of biathlon World Cups over here in the US with some pursuits and sprints; and then more sprints this week.
• I editorialized somewhat on the recurring complaints about the strengths and weaknesses of athlete ranking lists.
• We assessed just how well (or poorly) the Rybinsk races were, along with recapping some of the specific performances.
• I also checked in on some of the US results from the Scandinavian Cup races over the past few weekends.
• I weighed in, lightly, on the somewhat odd debate that flared up at FasterSkier over whether men and women should race the same distances.
• I decided that some graphs I made for looking at the performance of the Norwegian men’s distance team were interesting enough to apply to several other nations as well.
• Finally, I lamented the fact that cross country’s sprint racing format involves five quarterfinal heats. I feel dirty just writing that.

I’m a stats guy.  I love numbers and data and graphs.  I will happily admit that this tends to make me, shall we say, particular about all things quantitative.  Some people may call it being anal; I prefer to think of it as being correct.

Which is why I need to take a moment to shake my fist angrily at the sky over the fact that cross country ski racing currently employs a sprint racing format that uses five quarterfinal heats.  Five.

Anyone remotely familiar with the English language ought to concede that if your tournament format has quarterfinals, there really ought to be four of them.  Now, I understand the difficulties here.  Thirty skiers advance to the elimination round heats.  Thirty is not evenly divisible by four.  So our options are limited to five heats of six skiers or six heats of five skiers. [1. Anyone suggesting 10 heats of 3 or 3 heats of 10 have clearly never participated in or organized a sprint race.]

The Latin and Greek prefix options are, to be honest, not encouraging.  Pentafinals has a distinct NAMBLA air to it, that I think we can all agree is distasteful.  Sexafinals sounds considerably more enjoyable and entertaining for skiers and spectators alike, but is also probably not appropriate.

That leaves Hexafinals and Quintafinals.  Hexafinals isn’t too bad, but some may complain that it conjures images of witches, or voodoo, or some such nonsense.  Quintafinals just sounds like your sprint race has been sponsored by a sub-par motel chain.

Personally, I’d probably be ok with hexafinals, but then there would need to be six of them and I doubt FIS is going to switch up the format just to satisfy my numerical and linguistic preferences.

Or we could just call them Elimination Rounds 1, 2 and 3.

But they aren’t quarterfinals, goddammit!  There are five of them.

More World Cup action from my home state! Technically, I’m more from Southern Maine, and there really is a distinction, but no matter. Looks like Scott Perras had an excellent race for the Canadians! Lowell Bailey had a good, but maybe not great day.

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