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{ Monthly Archives } September 2011

Who’s Producing Fast Young Male Skiers?

A quick follow up to my previous post on the same topic for women. Swap Germany for Russia, and otherwise the answer is largely unchanged: Once again, this is the number of skiers born since 1988 who’s best FIS points results last season averaged better than 50 FIS points. I used a more strict cutoff […]

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Who’s Producing Fast Young Female Skiers?

Answer: Norway. And Russia. Looking forward to the upcoming season, I’m somewhat astounded by the number of talented young Norwegian women on the horizon. Here’s a quick snapshot of what I’m talking about. I took female skiers born no earlier than 1988 who did at least 3 FIS races last season, and averaged their best […]

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At What Age Do Skiers Peak?

If you imagine a typical skier’s career in FIS points, it will often follow a vaguely parabolic shape: they get faster for a while and then get slower for a while.  Somewhere in between there they “peaked”.  Our goal in this post is to estimate approximately when this occurs for each athlete and then see […]

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Climb To The Castle – Previous Year’s Comparison

Since earlier this week I gave some context for what people’s performances would roughly translate into compared to how Kris Freeman and Liz Stephen skied on the WC last season, I thought I should provide some context for my context, so to speak. So the following two graphs show how various folks from last years […]

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Climb To The Castle – Women

Same story as last time, only the women this time. Kikkan Randall may have made a better benchmark, but Liz Stephen is no slouch in WC distance events either. As before, all of this is highly approximate. I’ve taken Stephen’s races from last season, removed some of the least comparable (prologue’s for example), and then calculated where […]

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Climb To The Castle – Men

This annual rollerski race was this past weekend, and as usual attracted a fair number of good domestic skiers. With the US Ski Team attending, it’s a good chance for folks to test themselves against folks like Kris Freeman. As with any other race, it’s natural to ask what the results “mean”. There are no […]

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Can Bjørgen Repeat Her Dominant Performance?

Marit Bjørgen pretty much wiped the floor with folks last year in distance events: As a stats guy, when I see extreme events I tend not to expect them to repeat themselves. The general principle here is called regression to the mean. Extreme events are just unlikely, so it doesn’t make sense to expect them […]

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