My good friend, and general cycling expert, Cosmo recently tweeted about what he perceived as more GC (overall ranking) shakeups taking place in Tour de France stages with a downhill finish as opposed to uphill, mountaintop, finishes. Â He then followed that up with a comment to that effect, linking back to my bumps chart as […]
Also tagged cycling, technical, tour de franceI’ve fussed in the past about the weaknesses of FIS points in distance events, but they really are quite useful. Â Sprint events, however, just don’t have an equivalently simple and useful numerical summary. Â I’ve resorted to using the final finishing rank (i.e. what place you came in, after the elimination rounds), but I’ve never been […]
Also tagged Athlete Ranking, Sprint, technicalThis idea comes from a similar sort of game that baseball stat heads play. Â The idea is to match up similar athletes based upon their performances. Â In baseball, we’d look at a whole slew of statistics for some current player’s career and then scan through the historical records and find other players who had similar […]
Also tagged athlete similarity, DistanceThis whole victims and nemeses thing is entertaining up to a point, but the most interesting about it is that it sometimes leads me to comparisons and graphs that I wouldn’t have thought of looking at otherwise. Â That’s what happened when I sat down today intending to dash off something quick about Kris Freeman’s victims […]
Also tagged Distance, jiri magal, kris freeman, mathias fredricksson, nemeses, pietro piller cottrer, victimsPreviously, I described some problems with using percent back (PB) as a basis for comparing race performances. Â Namely, mass start and interval start races produce very different types of PB’s. Â In this post we’ll briefly consider whether this problem is actually worth worrying about and then I’ll finish with a simple solution.
Also tagged Distance, eqpb, fis points, interval, mass, technicalThis topic is going to be somewhat more technical than usual. Â It involves some inside baseball, to mix sports metaphors, so if the nitty gritty details of FIS point calculations don’t strike you as an exciting page turner, you’ve been warned! Â However, if you stick with me, you’ll learn how brutally stupid FIS’s F-factor adjustments […]
Also tagged Distance, eqpb, f factor, fis points, interval start, mass start, technicalThis is the final post in a four part series on rookie performance on the World Cup. Â To recap: we’re trying to quantify differences in the level of preparation among athletes from different nations upon first entering the World Cup circuit. Â A “rookie skier” for our purposes is one who’s done seven or fewer races […]
Also tagged rookies, Sprint, US Skiing, World Cup