Statistical Skier

Kris Freeman is simply the best distance skier in the US at the moment, male or female.  In fact, he probably has been for at least the past 4 years or so.

Unfortunately, that means he’s under a lot of pressure to produce quality results, medals in particular.  That’s not terribly fair, in a cosmic sense, but I suppose that’s life.

One consequence of these expectations has been that he can come in for quite a bit of criticism when he doesn’t perform well.  From what I’ve heard about him, he’s probably harder on himself than most anyone else.  And in any case, I seriously doubt that much of the disappointment surrounding him in terms of “near misses” or “missed opportunities” is truly deserved.  Learning how to train and race effectively with diabetes simply makes everything he does harder.

All that aside, let’s look at how he’s fared over the years:

Freeman has actually been slowly returning to form over the past few season, despite the occasional very bad race.  An interesting thing to notice here is that Freeman’s career to date can be neatly split into two halves: before and after the summer of 2004.  Don’t believe me?  How about if I highlight those two periods:

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I was listening to FasterSkier’s podcast the other day and was a bit startled to here one of the participants mention me by name![1. By the way, Christopher, it’s pronounced JOR-an; like “Jordan” but with no “d”.  My parents gave me the Scandinavian name, but not the Scandinavian pronunciation.  And shame on you, Colin, for not correcting him.  You know how to say my name!]

The topic was whether we tend to see the same few skiers at the top in women’s sprint races more than in men’s races.  In other words, are we more likely to see “random” skiers make the A-final or even the top three in a men’s sprint race?  I actually posted something related to this a while back that was more geared towards the question of competitiveness.  I did some fancy math and concocted something to measure this idea that I called “churn”.  Basically it measures the degree to which we see the same group of people in the top 3, or top 5 or whichever group we’d like to look at.  But the graph in that post isn’t very useful for comparing men and women directly.

Let’s start really simple.  For sprinting, I’d say we’re most interested in the top 3 (podium) and the top 6 (the A-final).  Last season we saw 15 different women on the podium versus 19 for the men.  There were 32 different women women reached the A-final (top 6) at least once, versus 34 for the men.  On a basic level, this supports the notion that there’s more “churn” in men’s sprinting, while we’re more likely to see the same women in the top 3 or 6 in sprint races.

But the differences are pretty small, of course.  So keep in mind that often we’re talking about an extra 3-4 skiers rotating into the podium spots or the A-final.

I’m not going to rehash my derivation of how I defined churn.  You can go reread the above link if you’d like.  Let’s just say that the result is a number between 0 and 1.  A churn of 0 would mean that the exact same set of skiers is on the podium (in a possibly different oder) every single race.  A churn of 1 would mean that every race we get a totally new set of skiers on the podium.  Here’s two bar charts comparing men and women for several seasons:

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First real races of the season are this weekend in Rybinsk and Muonio!  So far I’ve managed a decent posting schedule along with my teaching job, but now we’re adding the task of updating (and cleaning) my results database as new races roll in.  This is harder to automate than it may seem, mostly because I have really absurd standards for preventing errors.  Regular expressions can produce a feeling of God-like power, but it’s tough for even God to anticipate all possible athlete name mis-spellings.

At the moment I’m anticipating being able to keep up with it all, but we’ll see.

Posts from this week:

• The first two installments of my USST season preview series, looking at Liz Stephen and Morgan Arritola, and then Noah Hoffman and Simi Hamilton.
• A look at a skiing nation that probably doesn’t get much attention, Japan.  Specifically, we looked at how they fared at World Junior Championships and U23’s last season.

The USST previews will continue next week with Kikkan Randall, Andrew Newell and Kris Freeman.

Finally, I shared this video I stumbled across on the Statistical Skier Facebook page, which I thought was amusing, despite not understanding the language.  See if you can spot the skiers racing with a water bottle! It’s the very first World Cup mass start race in Castelrotto, ITA in 1987. Trail design hadn’t quite adjusted to the new format.

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This is part two in a short series of season preview posts on USST athletes in which I’ll review each skier’s results to date and make some guesses about how they’ll fare in the upcoming season.  I don’t have any special insight into the future beyond my database of past race results, and I certainly am not using some fancy predictive model.  While I’ll likely support a fair bit of my guesses with data of some form, I obviously wouldn’t take any of my predictions to Vegas with you.  And of course, my guesses are just me being a cynical realist, not necessarily an expression of what I’d like to happen.

The two newest members of the USST are kind of tough for me to write prognosticating posts about.  They simply haven’t accumulated as much racing data for me to play with.  I’ll throw up some graphs anyway, but in the end I have even less to go on here than for Morgan Arritola and Liz Stephen.

Simi Hamilton sort of burst onto the scene last year with some impressive sprint results, including a win at US nationals and then winning the qualification round at U23s (he had a bit of a mishap with his pole in the elimination rounds and ended up 26th).  This led to his inclusion on the US Olympic team, where he managed to make it through the qualification round to finish 29th in Vancouver.

He did three other WC sprint races last season, qualifying (in 23rd) for the elimination rounds in one of them to finish 28rd.  That’s just not a lot of international level racing for me to compare to other sprinters.  Still, here’s a plot of his sprint results so far:

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