I can’t believe I forgot about the dominant Estonian skier Kristina Smigun-Vaehi. Â For individual events (distance and sprint), her stats are amazing: three Olympic medals (2 Gold), four World Championship medals and forty-nine World Cup podiums. Â 106 of her 161 World Cup results were top ten finishes. Â She might not have as much Olympic hardware […]
Tagged kristina smigun-vaehi, retirement, retrospectiveContinuing in my series of posts (see here and here) we move on to Norway. Â This presents some problems, graphically, since as you might imagine there are many, many more Norwegians who’ve skied well at WJCs or U23s. Â This means that if I simply recreate the graphs following my previous examples, they will likely be […]
Tagged Age, development, U23, WJC/U23One 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.
Tagged variability, visualization, WJC/U23Apparently this is our modern rivalry on the men’s side of things. Â I suppose the Norwegians and Swedes will always find something to torment each other over, so this one is as good as any. Â Obviously, this story has many chapters left to be written, but let’s take a look at how things have progressed […]
Tagged head to head, marcus hellner, petter northugI thought it would be nice to collect all the cross-country skier retirement posts in one place, in case you missed some along the way. Â So here they are… Rene Sommerfeldt (GER) Sabina Valbusa (ITA) Anna Olson (SWE) Sara Renner (CAN) Virpi Kuitunen (FIN) Claudia Nystad (GER) Reto Burgermeister (SUI) Milan Sperl (CZE) Laurence Rochat […]
Tagged retirement, retrospectiveI’m continuing to play with creating simple, annotated scalable vector graphics (SVGs) with this cycling data, as practice. It also gives me an excuse to look back at this years Giro. In this addition, we’re plotting the races of those riders who didn’t quite make it to the finish line. First plotted by general classification […]
Tagged cycling, giro d'italiaCue the creepy music, it’s Friday the 13th! We finally wrapped up the most improved/unimproved series from the 2009-2010 season, looking at the most unimproved female sprinters. We had another installment of Victims & Nemeses, this time focusing on Swedish stars Marcus Hellner and Charlotte Kalla. Next, we looked at age vs. FIS point plots […]
Tagged week in review