Skip to content

{ Monthly Archives } June 2012

Sprint Length (By Time)

By request, we’re looking at how the length of World Cup sprints has changed over time. Specifically, since the length in time of the effort is really more meaningful than the length of the course in terms of distance, that’s what we’ll consider. So the following graph shows the average of the top five qualification […]

Tagged , , ,

Sprint Heat Time Trends

Since I’m starting to accumulate a reasonable collection of heat times from World Cup sprint races, I thought it might be interesting to compare general trends between the few seasons I have data on. The biggest trends that you can typically see are the differences in tactics between the men and women. Generally what I’ve […]

Tagged , ,

Do Europeans Race Slower In North America?

Travel is a big issue for cross country skiers, particularly those of us living in North America.  Flying back and forth to Europe can be both time consuming and exhausting for athletes.  Obviously, this can have some serious effects on performance.  Of course, this works both ways.  Presumably it’s difficult for Europeans to travel to […]

Tagged , , ,

WJC Qualification Follow-Up

In a post last week I talked about how I felt that a single early season result wasn’t necessarily a great predictor of how someone will tend to ski (on average) during the rest of the season. I feel like most people would accept that this is, in principle, generally true. Just because you pop […]

Tagged , , ,

How Useful Is A Single Good Result?

Following up from last time, we’re still discussing the recent USSA rule changes for qualifying for WJC/U23s. Now, it’s not like USSA has a ton of options here, but I would like to point out a few difficulties with pre-qualifying an athlete using only a single result. Being a stats guy, I always think about […]

Tagged , , , , ,

New FIS Point Criteria for WJC Qualification

As often happens, FasterSkier gifted me with a handy topic for a few posts to kill time with over the summer by publishing a summary of USSA’s new criteria for automatic qualification for WJCs/U23s. For WJCs, the FIS point cutoff has been lowered to 50 for both men and women (it used to be higher […]

Tagged , , , ,

Performance Trends In US Alpine Skiing

This is just a quick note as I sift through some of the alpine skiing data. I’ve made similar plots as these for XC skiing in the past, so these are just the same idea but for the US alpine folks. First a look at the men: This is tracking the results (per race) for […]

Tagged ,