Statistical Skier

One of the interesting things we can look at with sprint races is differences between the various heats themselves, rather than individual skiers.  Interestingly, reconstructing this information, namely who was in what quarterfinal or semifinal, using just the split times took a little bit of thought.  Not a monumental challenge, but it was a bit trickier than my average graph.

Let’s start with the quarterfinals:

Men's quarterfinals; Davos WC sprint.

This graph tracks the members of each quarterfinal through the entire sequence of heats.  I’m still tinkering a little with the y-xis.  Rather than plotting everything relative to the fastest time of the day, I’m plotting them relative to the median time from the whole day.  The stats geek in me finds this more appropriate, but it doesn’t really change much.  The relative differences between each skier will be the same, but the interpretation is slightly different: 0% is the median skier, not the fastest.

Federico Pellegrino (the big winner in qualification and loser in the final) certainly did get quite lucky with a slow, slow, slow quarterfinal (red).  Quarterfinal 5 was probably the next easiest, at least in terms of competitiveness.  (Keep in mind that these graphs don’t tell us anything about crashes or other “extraneous events”, that can sometimes account for the speed of a heat.)

On the other hand, the women didn’t see such a stark difference between the quarterfinals:

Women's quarterfinals; Davos sprint.

Once again, these are the raw times, so this doesn’t reflect Kowalczyk’s relegation to 6th place in the final.  So that pair of dueling orange lines are Kowalczyk and Randall.

I think the most interesting quarter here is #4 (purple) where only Majdic made it all the way to the final thanks to lucky loser status.  So far this season it seems like Majdic has consistently been present in the sprints, but hasn’t really put anything impressive together in a final.

How about the semifinals: Continue reading ›

This recap is going to be fairly short.  I’m going to pass over Kris Freeman and Kikkan Randall, since neither had spectacular races but in neither case does it seem particularly significant to me.  Freeman reportedly was recovering from a cold and still managed a decent, but unimpressive race.  Randall had a legitimately bad race, but after a string of significantly improved distance results from her, it doesn’t surprise me to see her come back to earth a bit.  Also, she tweeted that she actually held back on that effort a bit to save herself for Sunday’s sprint race, which makes perfect sense for her, I think, and certainly seemed to pay off.

The Canadians, in what is becoming a tiring refrain this season, were a bit of a mixed bag.  Devon Kershaw had a solid race (9th) and George Grey perhaps shook off his early season struggles for a decent result (32nd).  Ivan Babikov, who is a stronger skater, had a race that was somewhat below average overall (38th) but actually fairly normal for a classic race for him.  But that’s by FIS points; here’s another view just using rank:

The red is Saturday’s classic race.  Babikov is the only one of these three whose results look seriously out of line with the past.  This might be another lesson in how much the Olympics dominate our field of vision in skiing.  The Canadian men skied so well and got so much attention from their results in Vancouver last year that it’s easy to forget how often these guys were outside the top 20-30 even just last year.  It’s a brutal game, the game of expectations.

Sadly, things aren’t getting much better it seems for Liz Stephen or Morgan Arritola.  Their points from this race certainly look bad, but let’s be cautious since there was such a huge gap from the winner to the field.  For a more comprehensive view, we’ll go back to the percent back difference plots:

Difference in % Back between Stephen and the field.

Difference in % back between Arritola and the field.

Both of these ladies were far enough back in this race that I decided to compare them to the entire field of racers.  As always, each dot represents an instance of them skiing against one of the athletes from the race in Davos.  Positive values mean they lost (bad) and negative values mean they won (good).  The red line is the median for each season and the red dot is the median for just Davos (blue).

In both cases things look about the same as what they’ve done overall this season, which isn’t all that great.  Liz Stephen had a decent race back in Gällivare (25th) but that’s about it.  What’s worse is that they actually seem to be doing slightly worse compared to last season, although there’s plenty of season left for them to turn that around.  I for one will be very interested to see how they fare against a domestic field later this season.

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I’ll have a separate post covering some of the North Americans tomorrow.  As usual, the choice of athletes to focus on is whatever strikes my fancy.  If you have suggestions/requests after each race, let me know in the comments of the race snapshot posts.

The first thing I want to note about Saturday’s distance races is that, for an interval start race, the results were slightly unusual.  Only slightly unusual for the men, but more so for the women.  On the men’s side, the field seemed pretty closely packed near the front, which is more typical of a mass start race.  For the women, we had another race with a handful of skiers way off the front created some interesting points situations further back.

Here, let me show you:

Continue reading ›

Helena Ekholm, back on top; tough day on the range for the Americans (and Magdalena Neuner).

Continue reading ›