WBC Men’s Sprint Recap
That’s right, we’re taking my new biathlon plots out for a spin this week. The World Biathlon Championships kicked off the individual events on Saturday with the sprint. Here’s a look at the top men (click through for full version):
The top panels are plotting the standardized percent back from the median skier (adjusted for differences in race format), with Saturday’s race circled in blue. The blue line tracks the median performance for each season. The bottom panels show each athlete’s shooting statistics for each season.
Arnd Peiffer may not have been on some people’s radar, and indeed this race is noticeably better than what’s ‘typical’ for him this season, Interestingly, the three other good races he’s had this year have also been in sprints, so apparently he really likes the shorter distances.
The American men had, I think, a very strong day, even though they’re probably looking for results better than 26th, 31st, 32nd and 42nd:
What a strong race from Leif Nordgren! In fact, by this measure each of these guys had their best race of the season thus far. The larger than usual field at World’s is probably padding these results somewhat, making them look at least slightly better, but I don’t think we should discount these efforts at all.
In particular, Tim Burke’s shooting still struggled a bit today, with 3 misses, but he’s clearly skiing well.
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I was thinking about biathlon formats, and realized that the sprint is really 3x ~3.33km. At that, the laps themselves are relatively long, in a short race. Perhaps Peiffer responds well to that, skiing hard, and keeping at that pace for longer per stint? Also, sprint courses make tend to be a bit different of layout, allowing a longer loop? I haven’t seen enough biathlon courses up close to make the call on that. Peiffer seems to be more of a fast twitch guy than a diesel type anyway.
That could be; I’m pretty unfamiliar with the biathlon scene and with Peiffer in particular.