A regular reader asked me over the weekend to comment on Devon Kershaw’s less than stellar opening race of the season. Specifically, he asked: Â Kershaw seems like he’s one of the most volatile skiers on the WC circuit. Is this true? The question of how consistent (or not) various skiers are comes up fairly regularly. […]
Also tagged devon kershaw, statisticsIn a word, no. Â But the relationship between consistency and speed is a little subtle. Â To look at this question let’s take the distance results from major international competitions (OWG, WSC or World Cups) and restrict ourselves to those times when an athlete did at least ten races in a particular season. Â Then for each […]
Also tagged Analysis, technical, variationA commenter asked about whether I could take the data from this post and look at trends over time. Â The answer, of course, if yes! The statistic of interest here is median absolute deviation (MAD), which is a measure of variability. Â In this case, we’re calculating a MAD value for each skier and each season […]
Also tagged biathlon, trend, variation, xcYes. That whole shooting bit. Â Tricky, isn’t it? So maybe a bit more discussion would be good. Â This graph shows the distributions of the median absolute deviations (MADs) by athlete and season, for those athletes who competed in at least five major competitions in that season. Biathletes, due to wild swings in shooting performance, are […]
Also tagged biathlon, xcOne of my articles for FasterSkier.com looked at variability in skier performance, particularly among elite World Cup skiers.  In truth, I kind of dashed that article off in a hurry simply because Kris Freeman happened to make a comment about the topic on his blog, and have always wanted to come back to the subject.
Also tagged visualization, WJC/U23