Statistical Skier

My eyes are a bit bleary from grading all day, otherwise I’d try to watch some of the WJC/U23 racing action that appears to be available online. As it is, here’s what’s been cooking here over the last week:

• Wrapping up a weekend of racing on both WC circuits before they take this one off: men’s and women’s classic distance races in Otepää, the classic sprints the next day, and the men’s and women’s biathlon mass start races.
• With Marit Björgen continuing her winning ways, I took a look at how to more fairly compare her record with that of Bente Skari and Elena Välbe.
• Another recap of the WC sprint heats and some other various odds and ends that occurred to me.
• In honor of the racing action being focused in the nation of Estonia, I devoted a post to the question of whether Andrus Veerpalu really does race unusually well at big events like the Olympics and World Championships.
• A brief summary of the results for two American biathletes who’ve been skiing well lately.
• I showed a little graphical evidence of something that I’ve mentioned a few times: that the men’s heats in WC sprint races are more likely to become slower as the day goes on than the women’s heats.
• Finally, an attempt to put the races of several of the U23 racers efforts in some more helpful context.

I’ve mentioned this from time to time in other posts, but one thing I’ve noticed from the sprint heat times that Jan at WorldOfXC.com has been providing me is that the women’s heats are more likely to increase in speed as the day progresses. I’ve said it enough that I should probably provide some evidence:

In blue I’ve shown the median value (and error bars representing the interquartile range, or middle 50%) for each heat. As you can see, the men’s heats tend to remain roughly flat, or slightly slower as the day wears on. The women, on the other hand, see more of a trend toward faster times as we progress through the quarters, semis and finals.

There could be fitness or physiological reasons for this, or it might be related to how competitive each gender’s qualification round happens to be. For instance, it may be that qualifying in the women’s sprints is enough easier (by this I mean that there is a tendency for the men’s field to be somewhat deeper) which allows many of the women to back off somewhat in qualification.

But another possibility I’d like to suggest is that as the men move into the semis and finals, they are less willing to hammer right out of the gate in an attempt to break their competitors. Instead, they’ll tend to play more of a waiting game.

[ad#AdSenseBanner]

It’s always nice to see my countrymen (and women) skiing fast, so it’s been fun to see Lowell Bailey and Laura Spector posting some good results on the IBU World Cup scene over the past several weeks. Let’s just check in and see how these results compare to their past:

These are only “major” races (WC, OWG and WBC) and only Bailey had enough seasons under his belt to warrant a trend line. For Bailey, his improvement is probably as much from a reduced number of bad races as it is from an increased number of good ones. Spector, on the other hand, has simply posted half a dozen races that are as good or better than anything she’s done in the past.

Unsurprisingly, both of these athletes seem to have improved their shooting over last season:

Continue reading ›

As always, heat time data supplied by WorldOfXC.com.

Beginning with the men:

Ola Vigen Hattestad went progressively slower as the day wore on, though often there are tactical reasons for that depending on the speed of your heat. And of course, he ended up second. There is also the issue of skiers switching between classic and skating skis given the flat course.

Erik Brandsdal qualified with a fairly fast time, but then managed to get through the quarters and semis with comparatively easier efforts. The same was true for Nikita Kriukov, but this didn’t lead to quite as happy an ending in his case. Once again, the men’s final was a bit on the slow side considering all the times for the day. Another thing to note is that this marks the fourth sprint race this season where Jesper Modin has finished 6th (i.e. making the finals and then finishing last in the finals). Here’s a look at just his sprint performances: Continue reading ›