First Arianna Follis retires, and now we learn that Marianna Longa is heading out the door (again!). This strikes me as quite a blow to the Italian women’s team. Before I wrote this post, if you asked me to list some other top Italian women besides Follis and Longa off the top of my head, […]
Also tagged development, italy, retirementWhat can you say about Petra Majdic? The Slovenian was delightfully hard to miss on the ski trails. Known as a classic sprint specialist, she was no slouch at distance events either: From 2002 forward, that is some very consistent skiing, year in, year out. I realize that standardized percent behind the median skier may […]
Also tagged career retrospective, petra majdic, retirement, Sprint, World CupA 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, Distance, men, most improved, most unimproved, Sprint, World CupNo, not that A-Team, although that’s an amusing idea. I saw some discussion in the comments over at FasterSkier about whether Jessie Diggins ought to have been named to the US A Team rather than the B Team. Let’s be clear up front that this isn’t the sort of question you can answer by just […]
Also tagged jessie diggins, junior, usstLast time we looked at some skiers who made some big jumps on the WC circuit this past season, so now it’s time to look at some folks who saw big slides in the other direction. Since there are many different ways to measure performance, I’m using a combination several metrics. The methodology is the […]
Also tagged Distance, men, most unimprovedLast, but not least, Â the women’s sprinters, which was easily the highlight of the season for the Americans: The Canadian women recovered somewhat after two rough seasons. While they didn’t have the eye-catching results of Kikkan Randall, the Canadian women have three different skiers (Crawford, Gaiazova, Jones) who qualified for the heats more than once, […]
Also tagged canada, kikkan randall, recap, season review, Sprint, USAContinuing on from last time, now we move on to the women’s distance events. We’ll start out the same way, with a basic graph showing the number of results per race for various levels of performance: The Canadian women built up steadily under the Beckie Scott/Sara Renner days, but haven’t quite found any replacement for […]
Also tagged canada, Distance, kikkan randall, season recap, USA