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{ Author Archives }

Ruka Classic Sprint Predictions

Don’t take this too seriously. This is mostly an intellectual exercise for me, based on an interesting method that was suggested to me several months ago. I’m not going to go into the details at the moment, I’m mainly recording the predictions here just to force myself to commit to following up on it afterwards. […]

Diversity of Nations

I thought it might be a decent time to revisit a thing I’ve done periodically, which is measure the diversity of nationalities among the top finishers. There are a ton of different diversity indexes, coming up mostly from either ecology (species diversity) or information theory (think Claude Shannon). I don’t think I’ve been very consistent, […]

Bolshunov’s Decimation of the Field

Alexander Bolshunov won the 2022 Olympic 30k skiathlon the other day with a rather eye-popping margin. This sort of thing always causes people to start asking questions about You Know What. I’m not interested or qualified to weigh in on that, but anything unusual is always interesting from a data perspective, and this is no […]

Sprint Quarterfinal Choices

Of course Devon would spend a bunch of time talking numbers in this week’s podcast when I happen to have tons of stuff I should be doing besides making skiing graphs. Oh well. That’s what I get for outsourcing all my ideas on what to write about to other people. Anyhoo, Devon spent some time […]

Sophia Laukli Has A Strong Early Race in Beitostoelen

The first round of ‘pre-season’ races are complete and one American result stood out to me in Beitostoelen. Sophia Laukli finished 7th in a 10k freestyle in a field comprised of mostly Norwegians. She finished 1:24 behind the winner Therese Johaug, or around 6.4% back. That’s a big margin to be behind most winners, but […]

The USA-CAN Men’s Relay Rivalry Has A Very Long History

Warning: this post contains no statistics and virtually no data, but I suspect it may be fairly entertaining! During most of my lifetime, the US & Canadian men’s 4x10km relay teams have not often been in medal contention, although the Canadians definitely had some strong teams for a period with Devon Kershaw, Alex Harvey, Ivan […]

Even Bigger Winner Margins!

Therese Johaug already made me write one post on this topic this championships and now she’s forced me to write another. So I promise I’ll keep this short, unlike the gaps from Johaug to the next skier. Therese Johaug once again won a race by a very large margin, this time in the 30km classic […]