Race Snapshot: IBU WC 2 Men’s Pursuit
The Norwegian men continue their dominance of the biathlon circuit:
Tagged biathlon, men, pursuit, race snapshot, World CupThe Norwegian men continue their dominance of the biathlon circuit:
Tagged biathlon, men, pursuit, race snapshot, World CupInteresting results on the men’s side; so far Björgen’s just on another planet.  Full versions below the fold.
Tagged classic, Davos, Distance, race snapshot, World CupThe 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:
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). Â No prizes, but it’s pretty fun and there are a fair number of people playing.
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Tagged week in reviewDecent race for Tim Burke, very good day for Sara Studebaker. Â Full versions below the fold.
Tagged biathlon, race snapshot, World CupThis is a bit after the fact, but I can’t let good data go to waste. Â 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. Â 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 ›
Tagged kuusamo, men, recap, Sprint, women, World CupAs I was perusing some of the other assorted race results from last weekend, the FIS races in Norway caught my eye. Â Of course, most of the press went to Petter Northug, with his victory in Saturday’s 30km skate race, presumably indicating that his fitness is returning.
A little further down the results sheet, but not too far, was Great Britain’s Andrew Musgrave in 6th, around 52 seconds behind Northug, good enough for around 26 FIS points. Â He had some good results in November as well, so I thought it might be fun to take a closer look.
First of all, here’s a look at all the distance races I’ve got for him:
Saturday’s 30km skate race is the blue dot all the way down in the right hand corner, easily his best result, measured by FIS points at least. Â I highlighted the technique of each race to point out that Musgrave seems to have had an affinity for skating over classic races. Â I point this out mostly to say that Musgrave’s performance on Sunday in the 10km classic seemed like quite a let down after the day before (33rd, ~70 FIS FIS points), but that’s at the high end of his classic results from the past two seasons.
FIS points are an admittedly crude measure in this instance, so let’s look at a percent-back difference plot of Musgrave versus the top 40 from Saturday’s 30km skate race: Continue reading ›
Tagged andrew musgrave, DistanceYesterday 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. Â Since I don’t believe in erasing my mistakes from the inter-webs, my edits are sort of interspersed throughout the entire original post. Â 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. Â 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. Â I’m doubly irritated by this mistake since for some reason when that changeover happened refuses to remain lodged in my brain. Â 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. Â 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. Â 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. Â Sorry!
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Tagged andrew newell, heats, qualification, Sprint