As promised from last time, a quick look at some similar data broken down by race length. I’ve filtered out the occasional “strange” race length, to focus on just the standard 5, 10, 15, 30 and 50 kilometer distances. The metric is the same: the median number of skiers within a fixed percent of the […]
Also tagged competitiveness, field strength, World CupHey, the first international ski races of the 2011-2012 season took place recently in New Zealand! They are officially FIS sanctioned races, but my impression is that they have a bit more of a training camp time trial feel to them. The Americans, Canadians, some Russians, and then an assortment of Japanese, Korean, and locals […]
Also tagged continental cup, justyna kowalczyk, new zealand, noah hoffmanOnce again, I use the term junior a little lightly. That’s especially true for the women, since it’s a bit more likely to see younger women establish themselves on the WC scene. So some of these names aren’t really “up and comers” anymore, but they are still quite young. As before, we’re using FIS points, […]
Also tagged junior, Sprint, womenI use the term ‘Junior’ fairly loosely here. Mainly I’m referring to folks who are young enough to be at the very start of their (hopefully long) career. I basically just grabbed the names of the skiers with some of the best FIS points results last season who are no older than ~23 (although that’s […]
Also tagged junior, men, SprintConventional 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 Age, SprintA while back I responded to a reader requesting that I look into any connections between a skier’s performance at World Juniors and subsequent medal winning. Â My conclusions there tended toward the ambiguous, since 2-4 races (from World Juniors) just isn’t a whole lot of information. But we can also just take medalists and look […]
Also tagged Age, Analysis, development, goalsA commenter asked if there was a connection between my lists of improved and un-improved skiers and age. Easy enough to check, so let’s go to the tape. Here are the distance skiers: The y-axis (Improvement Index) has no units, so don’t try to interpret it. It’s just the mash-up of several ways of measuring […]
Also tagged Age, men, most improved, most unimproved, Sprint, women, World Cup