Statistical Skier

This is part one 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.

I’m putting Morgan Arritola and Liz Stephen into a single post since they’ve had quite similar results so far in their careers and they both focus mostly on distance events.  Let’s start off with a quick look at their results so far:

The colors are only a rough classification of races into major international (WC, OWG and WSC) other international (OPA, WJC, U23 etc.) and domestic (SuperTour, Nationals, FIS races, etc.).  Not all of the “domestic” races necessarily took place in the US, but you get my drift.

As you can see, their results have been pretty similar, at least in terms of FIS points.  Arritola probably had the better season last year, mostly due to a few slightly better races and fewer really slow races.  Stephen has mentioned in interviews I believe being somewhat overtrained (or something) which led to some disappointing results last year.  Presumably, she’ll adjust her training to address that this year.

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One really simple question that occurred to me while playing with all this skiing data is, How many races do these athletes actually do?

Now, I can’t really answer that completely, since I don’t have every single cross country ski race in existence in my database.  But what I’m really getting at is the notion that we’ve seen an ever increasing number of races on the international scene:

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Conventional wisdom holds (so I’m told) that World Cup skiers go faster these days for a variety of reasons: improved grooming technology, improved equipment/waxing, larger athlete pool, better training/diet (on average) etc.  It would be neat if this trend showed up in results data.  Namely, have the top times for races of a set distance been falling over time?

As you can probably guess already, this is not so easy to establish.  Along with the factors I listed above that will generally push race times downward, we have the fact that race courses are being designed to account for this, presumably to make them more challenging.  The combination of all this might mean that we see no net change in times at all.  Or do we? Continue reading ›

Sometimes it’s a good thing to ask basic questions that everyone thinks they know the answer to.  Sometimes you get surprising answers, sometimes not.

So, how old are World Cup skiers?

In general, World Cup skier ages tend to center around 25-26.  These distributions all have a slight right skew, which just means there tend to be some more unusually large values (i.e. older skiers).

So far, this isn’t surprising at all, it’s about what we’d expect.  The one interesting thing that does pop up is the slight trend toward older skiers in recent seasons.  As we move forward through time, the distributions move (slightly) to the right, and you can notice that the darker colored curves (recent) tend to be above the lighter curves (less recent) for the older skiers.

So it would appear that (within this time frame, at least) World Cup skiers have become slightly older.

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