What do I notice about the men’s podium from Saturday’s 15k classic race: Excepting Poltaranin, not much racing at this level between them. In fact, among the youngest men’s distance podiums I have on record (basically since the early 90’s): Saturday’s race is that unusually low value in the lower right corner. As […]
Also tagged Analysis, Distance, men, podium, World CupI’m going to do something stupid in this post. I’m going to disagree with someone who has likely forgotten more about the sport of XC skiing than I will ever know. It’s World Championship team selection time, and in North America that pretty reliably means some drama from the peanut gallery, represented here by the […]
Also tagged Analysis, development, rants, World CupContinuing with the athlete development theme recently, here’s a graph showing the age at which a skier races in their first WC versus their overall median WC result: For fairly obvious reasons, you have read this fairly carefully, particularly at the more extreme ages. I wouldn’t pay much attention to either panel past the age […]
Also tagged development, men, women, World CupEveryone wants to nab podiums at the World Cup level, which means everyone can be pretty fascinated with the development characteristics of those skiers who end up on the podium. Here’s yet another way to slice that. If we take the skiers who’ve attained at least one podium result at the WC level between 2006-2007 […]
Also tagged development, Distance, men, Sprint, women, World CupEarlier this week I tweeted a little nugget I stumbled across: that Jessie Diggins now owns around half of all top 30 results for US skiers 21 years old or younger over the past two decades. In contrast, the most any single Norwegian contributes over the same time period is around 10% of all their […]
Also tagged Analysis, jessie digginsIf you imagine a typical skier’s career in FIS points, it will often follow a vaguely parabolic shape: they get faster for a while and then get slower for a while. Â Somewhere in between there they “peaked”. Â Our goal in this post is to estimate approximately when this occurs for each athlete and then see […]
Also tagged peakingConventional wisdom (and probably a fair bit of physiology research) holds that going fast over short distances is a skill we tend to lose as we age. Â Are fast World Cup sprinters younger than fast distance skiers? Let’s look at the age distributions of top thirty racers in sprinting and distance races since the 2003-2004 […]
Also tagged Distance, Sprint