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Race Snapshot: TdS Classic Sprint

Great day for North America, overall.  Fantastic races by Kershaw and Harvey and strong efforts by Freeman and Randall (for a classic sprint, not her specialty, certainly not Freeman’s).  Newell probably isn’t thrilled with his 12th place, given how much stumbling around it sounded like he did during the semis, but it’s not a terrible result for him.

On the international side, the men’s semis were dominated (in numbers, if not the results) by the Russians and Swedes.  Norway can’t be thrilled with that.  As usual, more diverse on the women’s side, with Majdic finally shaking off whatever was holding her back earlier in the season.  Also, Krista Lahteenmaki is quickly becoming an interesting skier to watch.  Will this be a one season hot streak, or will she be a superstar in a few years?

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Race Snapshot: TdS Pursuit

These race snapshot graphs are quite a bit different from usual.  First, today’s pursuit is essentially an old style two day pursuit with the techniques reversed (skating yesterday, classic today).  So the stage results from today include yesterday’s time (minus the bonus seconds from yesterday).  Hence, my race snapshot graphs won’t compare today’s stage to a particular technique, since today’s result includes racing from both, but isn’t a continuous pursuit.

The other change stems from the fact that if you check out the raw results from today you’ll notice that the points awarded were unusually low.  This is something that we’re used to seeing in mass start races and continuous pursuits, where the pace is often artificially slow, allowing skiers deeper in the field to remain close to the leader.  In fact, the points were so low today that I decided it made more sense to adjust them using my equivalent percent back (EqPB) method (outlined here and here).  This means I’m essentially treating today’s race as a mass start event, which isn’t technically true.  It also means that while the order of the athletes is unchanged, the points plotted here are not the official FIS points awarded to the athletes!  Generally speaking they are somewhat inflated.  But after comparing these with the same plots using the raw FIS points, I’ve decided that these give a more accurate view of how people did today compared to their past performances.

And of course, nice job Devon Kershaw!  <sarcasm> But remember folks, according to the geniuses at FIS, today’s race wasn’t really a World Cup race, so this doesn’t really count as a World Cup podium result for the Canadian.  Aw, shucks!  </sarcasm>

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Week In Review: Friday Dec 31st

Happy (Almost) New Year!  And thanks once again to Skadi Nordic for sponsoring this week in review.  As the Tour de Ski get’s rolling, here’s what we’ve been up to this week:

I had planned to post something looking at the North American domestic scene, but some of the last races in December were slow to appear on the FIS site, and then it was Christmas and now US Nationals are right around the corner.  So I have some stuff thought out on that subject, but at this point it probably makes more sense to wait until after US Nationals and assess where we are then.

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Race Snapshot: TdS Prologue

I debated whether these snapshot graphs would be sensible for the prologue (and also some other TdS stages as well) since the race formats during the Tour are a bit odd, so comparisons to the past are fairly tenuous.  Also, I think the prologue event is kind of dumb, but that’s just my own bias.  I decided to try them for now.  I’m going to play it by ear with the handicap start stages later on, though, as sometimes FIS scores a “pursuit” stage like a two day pursuit and sometimes they’ve scored only the times from that day (despite the handicap style start).

I believe tomorrow’s pursuit stage will be treated like a two day pursuit, so the Stage 2 winner will be the person with the best combined time, but they don’t count the prologue time twice for the TdS overall.  I’ll spend some time today seeing if I can come up with a sensible race snapshot graph for that kind of event…

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NOW Is It Panic Time For The Norwegian Men’s Distance Team?

Back in September I wrote a post looking at the supposed woes of Norway’s male distance team.  The bottom line was that, yes, by various measures things haven’t been looking as good lately for the Norwegian men’s distance squad.  With the first period of racing completed, and more rumblings in Norway about their poor performance, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit and update my previous post.

As before, I’m going to avoid fancier metrics like FIS points and stuff.  So here’s an updated graph showing the number of athletes Norway, Sweden and Russia have placed in various groups, per race, over time:

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2011 Tour de Ski Preview

Ok, so this isn’t much of a preview.  Rather it’s just a bird’s eye view of what happened last year using some bumps plots.  Here’s how things played out for the men:

2010 Men's Tour de Ski

The median skier can sort of be thought of as the “peloton”.  As you can see, not much happened until Stage 5, the first really long distance event of the Tour.  That stage clearly split the group into three main packs, with some stragglers in the back.  These groups mostly stayed together through Stage 6, but then began to drift apart in Stages 7 and 8.  Emil Jönsson bagged his sprint WC points and then packed it in despite leading after four stages.

The women, not surprisingly, were a bit more scattered: Continue reading ›

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Mid-Season Review: North American Sprint

Continuing on from my last post on North American distance skiers, let’s jump right in with the sprinters, starting with the men:

No fancy metrics here, just what place people finished in.  Once again, red is this season, blue is last year’s Olympics.  Alex Harvey’s sprint race in Kuusamo was unusually good for him.  Simi Hamilton had one excellent race and two pretty bad ones, although he’s been struggling with a leg injury for a while.  Stefan Kuhn hasn’t really put one together yet, but his two results around 30th aren’t exactly atypical for him so far in his career.  Kershaw had a strong sprint result in Kuusamo and then an unusually bad one.

Len Valjas certainly had some promising results, but then, we don’t have much to compare that to in terms of data.  Phil Widmer had one pretty bad race and another excellent one.

Andrew Newell is the most consistent of these guys, at least in terms of putting himself in the top 30 or top 20.  People keep waiting for Newell to put together a podium finish again, but keep in mind that his sprint results so far this season are right in line with how he normally does.

As for the women: Continue reading ›

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