Statistical Skier

Kind of a rough day for the Americans today in biathlon, but some solid Canadian results.  Brendan Green and Scot Perras both had good races as well as Zina Kocher.

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Once again, many thanks to Skaði Nordic for sponsoring this week’s Week In Review.  Here’s what been cooking:

• Race snapshots from racing since last Friday: the Davos classic WC, the men’s and women’s biathlon WC pursuit, the Davos WC sprint.  Finally, another biathlon race, this time the men’s and women’s distance events.
• Some recaps and summaries of the weekend’s racing, starting with the Davos distance races, and then another focusing on North Americans.  Then a quick recap of the sprint race in Davos and a followup looking at how people fared in the quarterfinals and semifinals.
• Upon a reader’s request, I took a stab at looking the question of whether Japan’s WC skiers tend to be better at classic skiing.  This turned out to be pretty interesting, so I’m going to be following it up with similar posts looking at Italy and Norway over the next week or two.  Italy in particular ended up being really fascinating.
• US coach Chris Grover once again said something interesting that I could actually check with some data, regarding Kikkan Randall and her chances for making the sprint finals.
• I decided to provide a somewhat more accessible source for WC points data to the general public.
• Finally, I went on a bit of a rant regarding the issue of how we count World Cup victories.  Sound boring?  It isn’t.  Be sure to check all the comments on that one.

Holy cow!  Did I really do all that this past week?  Good for me.

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They aren’t what stat-heads like myself would choose to do “serious” stuff, but World Cup points are what makes the XC world go round.  FIS provides a few tools for looking up athlete’s WC points here and here.  They’re pretty decent, by their standards, allowing you to switch between Overall, Distance and Sprint points, filter by nation, season, etc.

That’s pretty cool, but we can do better.  You know those PDF reports that FIS issues after each race, tracking the WC points for each athlete and each race?  Yeah, putting that data in a PDF is like locking it away in a hermetically sealed chamber guarded by feral dragons on crack.  Less cool.

As a modest public service, I’m aiming to make this data more available.  Later today there will be a link over on the right that will take you to a Google spreadsheet that mimics the PDF reports that FIS publishes.  I have it set so that anyone with the link can view it and download it in various formats to put it in your own spreadsheet application of choice (or any other application if you prefer).  Then you can mess around with it on your own!

Here’s a simple visualization of the total WC points so far this season, showing only those athletes with at least 30 total WC points:

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So US coach Chris Grover mentioned to FasterSkier.com that he thought that when Kikkan Randall qualifies in the top ten that’s a really good sign that she has a good chance to make the finals.

I did this once before with an interesting quote of his, and I feel kind of bad.  I’m not trying to pick on him, but this is such an obvious thing to check with some actual data, I just can’t pass it up.

Here’s Randall’s qualification and final ranks for WC, WSC and OWG sprint races:

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