I 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 […]
Tagged Distance, 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 […]
Tagged Age, Distance, SprintThe USST has expanded somewhat, adding several younger skiers. Acknowledging that FIS points are only a small piece of performance assessment, it has interested me that at various times USST staff have mentioned comparing skiers’ FIS points to medalists, or some other group of top skiers. So here are two graphs showing the younger US […]
Tagged cohort, fis points, men, performance, usst, women, youngI haven’t done one of these in a while, but with Mika Myllylae in the news recently I thought this might be fun… This head-to-head matchup might not be the first you’d think of to look at, but you end up with an interesting graph nonetheless. Â As always, I grabbed the 54 races where Myllylae […]
Tagged head to head, mika myllylae, thomas alsgaardIn a previous post I raised the question of whether biathletes might be more likely to shoot clean (i.e. hit all five targets) if they have just shot clean at their most recent trip through the shooting range. I left off with some numbers that suggested this was the case, but they were aggregated over […]
Tagged Analysis, biathlon, clutch, probability, shooting, World CupThe concept of a “hot hand” is a popular one in various sports, and has been variously bunked, debunked and rebunked in numerous contexts. Â A common manifestation of this idea comes from basketball, where fans routinely feel that players will get “hot” during a stretch of a game during which they make a much higher […]
Tagged accuracy, biathlon, hot hand, shootingWith Marit Bjørgen (and only a handful of others) dominating the women’s WC circuit last season, I thought I’d check out how this compared to past seasons. I took all WC, OWG, WSC and TDS races for each season and counted the number of distinct skiers finishing at four different levels: 1st, top 3, top […]
Tagged competitiveness, World Cup