I’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 Age, development, rants, World CupA few more U23 historical performance plots, this time two European nations that happen to have some noticeable trends. First, Finland: The women have seen a drop off in distance results post-Lahteenmaki, but the men’s have declined steadily for quite some time now. The other nation we’re going to look at is Sweden: I mostly […]
Also tagged U23With a couple of races at WJC/U23s under our belts, let’s check in with how some nations are doing compared to previous years. Some obvious trends include Finland: Their junior women have continued to do worse in the distance events, but have improved in the sprint. For the Russians, it’s largely been more of the […]
Also tagged junior, WJCThe recent good fortune of the US women’s team, particularly in sprinting had me thinking a bit about measuring team performance in sprint events at a high level. The result was the following plots which show the rate at which the the top skiers (the top 4 in this case) in each race race one […]
Also tagged men, Sprint, women, World CupAs we approach the Tour de Ski, this is a short assessment of how the US and Canadian teams are doing so far compared to previous seasons. As I typically do, I’m going to include all World Cup results, rather than just the best results. Clearly, there have been some strong results for both the […]
Also tagged canada, Distance, men, mid season, Sprint, USA, women, World CupAnytime the World Cup hits North America, the issue of weaker fields always comes up. Frequently, even when American or Canadian skiers do seemingly very well here, there’s always that nagging feeling about how that result would translate to a more “complete” World Cup field in Europe. Overall, I think the US results in particular […]
Also tagged canada, performance, projection, USA, World CupThanks to a very helpful Bothan (who did not die to bring me this information!) I got a hold of the full birth dates of FIS registered XC skiers. That opens up a whole lot of new territory for me, but first things first: we need to talk about data quality. One minor caveat about […]
Also tagged birthdays, coincidences, World Cup