Statistical Skier

Continuing on from my previous post, let’s move on to look at how different nations fared compared to last year’s Tour (click through for full versions):

The German men struggled, but mainly that shows up here as skiers dropping out rather than performing poorly.  In fact, the one German man who made it all the way through the Tour performed about as well as the team did last year.  The Swiss men are obviously somewhat improved, with Cologna winning and Curdin Perl skiing about as well as Cologna did last year.

The Russian men actually did about the same.  They had lots of sprinters abandon the Tour, as they did last year, and those that finished ended up right where they were last year.  One other piece that stands out is that Kris Freeman really only had one bad stage (reportedly due to poor skis) but otherwise he was holding steady in the middle of the field.

The women saw a much improved showing by the Swedes, despite losing Anna Haag after Stage 7.  The German women, like the men, were decimated early on, with many skiers dropping out.  Interestingly, this doesn’t seem radically different than what happened last year, either.  The big losers here are clearly the Russian women, who by any reasonable measure had a terrible Tour compared to 2010.  Lots of abandoned skiers and several of those that did finish were well off the back.

I mentioned in my earlier post this morning that if you graph some of the top individual’s performances using time behind the leader rather than time behind the median skier, some different things pop out:

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Honestly, I’m too tired to comment much on this race.  Enjoy the graphs while I get some posts together recapping the entire Tour de Ski for tomorrow…

Spector-acular day for Laura?  Ok, so maybe I’m not that funny.  Still, looks like she had the race of her life (thus far)!

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This weekend will wrap up a busy 10 days of racing, both domestically and abroad.  The Tour de Ski, more biathlon World Cups, US Nationals, some NorAms in Canada and some OPA Cup races this weekend as well.  I try to stay on top of it as best I can, but I’m sometimes limited by the speed with which results are posted by FIS.  In particular, domestic races often take as long as five days to appear there.

That’s all just to say that some posts on the domestic racing scene are coming, hopefully next week sometime.  We’ll also have the completed Tour to chew over as well.  But what’s happened here over the past week?

• A ton of racing, so a ton of race snapshots: Tour de Ski Stage 2, Stage 3, Stage 4, Stage 5 and Stage 6, as well as today’s men’s sprint from the IBU World Cup.
• Race recaps from both the classic and freestyle Tour de Ski sprint races, showing how the various heats played out.
• I squeezed my mid-season review of the US biathlon squad in just before those World Cups started up again.
• The Tour de Ski stage events also give me the chance, on rest days, to make the sort of bump charts often seen for cycling races.  Examples from the first rest day can be found here and here from the first rest day and here and here from today.  Additionally, we can graph how different nations are doing compared to last year’s Tour.
• I took a moment to highlight the results of two Finnish skiers who’ve had some strong results of late, Krista Lahteenmaki and Matti Heikinen.

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