Statistical Skier

The Norwegian men continue their dominance of the biathlon circuit:

Continue reading ›

The XC World Cup scene moves on to Davos, Switzerland this weekend, while the biathlon World Cup already resumed today in Austria.

Here’s what you may have missed this past week:

• Race snapshots for the following races: Düsseldorf sprints, men’s biathlon sprint, men’s/women’s biathlon pursuits, and just today the men’s/women’s biathlon sprints.
• A recap of the Düsseldorf sprints featuring data on the times from each heat kindly provided by Jan over at WorldofXC.com.
• A somewhat belated recap of the Kuusamo sprint races, using data from the same source.
• A look at the age old question of Andrew Newell’s performance in qualification vs. heats, which required a bit of a correction.
• A look at some big names who competed in some smaller FIS races over the weekend.
• Finally, a quick look at some data on a promising young skier from Great Britain, Andrew Musgrave.

If you haven’t already, you should check out the “pick the podium” style game that Jan is running over at WorldofXC.com (you’re actually picking the top five).  No prizes, but it’s pretty fun and there are a fair number of people playing.

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This is a bit after the fact, but I can’t let good data go to waste.  Once again, thanks to Jan from WorldofXC.com for providing the data on times from the heats.

Ok, let’s get in our time machine and blast our way back to Finland for the women’s sprint:

All of the percent back values are calculated based upon the fastest time of the day from any round.  Marit Bjørgen certainly smoked everyone in qualification.  This should serve as a good reminder to folks who think it’s not a good idea to kill yourself in the qualification round.  That’s only really true relative to the sort of efforts you personally can put out.  Bjørgen in this case doesn’t pay a huge price for laying down a monster time in qualification because presumably her fitness level can handle it.  Qualifying with a fast time may or may not be damaging, depending whether you’re fit enough to handle it.

Moving on….that’s Justyna Kowalczyk failing to advance from the semis despite a really fast heat, as she was disqualified for skating around a turn.  Astrid Jacobsen seemed to be coming on strong all day posting successively faster times in each round, until she faded a bit in the final.

As for the men: Continue reading ›

Yesterday I posted some data looking at a popular hobby horse within the US skiing community: Andrew Newell’s alleged tendency to ski really fast in the qualification round and then not advance far (or not far enough) in the heats.

Last night a friend emailed me to let me know that I kind of screwed up that post and so I went back and edited it to fix the problems.  Since I don’t believe in erasing my mistakes from the inter-webs, my edits are sort of interspersed throughout the entire original post.  Because I think that makes the post somewhat hard to read and because we[1. By this, of course, we mean the royal we.] here at Statistical Skier believe in drawing as much attention to our mistakes as humanly possible, I decided this error of mine deserved a follow-up post of it’s own.

So once again, here’s the graph we’re discussing:

This is the median difference in the qualification rank and the final rank of male sprinters with at least 15 top thirty results from 2006-2007 forward.  The error bars can be thought of as estimates of variability (as before they are bootstrapped 90% confidence intervals, if that means anything to you).

My mistake was including results from when the heats only used the top 16 skiers.  I’m doubly irritated by this mistake since for some reason when that changeover happened refuses to remain lodged in my brain.  It’s possible that my friend who alerted me of the problem has answered that very question for me at least 3-4 times since I started this blog.  Argh!

That means that there were many more athletes present in the old graph with very small median differences, since I’d included a lot of instances of people finishing in 17th-30th in races where only the top 16 moved on.

You can go back and piece through my edited comments from yesterday, but the basic picture remains the same, I think, at least regarding Newell.  His median difference is about the same and compared to the group he still seems to suffer from this occurrence more often than most of his peers (at least, those with at least 15 top thirty finishes).

In any case, I screwed up.  Sorry!

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