American ski fans have gotten spoiled this season with some outstanding results. Even allowing for the fact that we probably all know that classic sprints aren’t really one of the stronger events for the US, today’s results might have seemed a bit underwhelming. This sort of situation is what I consider the ideal use of […]
Someone emailed me with this question, which is a common one that I’m sure I’ve written about multiple times before. But it’s an easy graph to make, and just posting it again is easier than finding one of my old posts. The question is how have race speeds changed over time. As you might expect […]
I don’t think it’s any secret that US skiers tend to have somewhat better results on the World Cup (and OWG/WSC/TdS) in freestyle events. Let’s quantify that a bit, starting with distance races: I’ve plotted major international results of both techniques (so no skiathlons) for the US men & women for the last decade or […]
I noticed an interesting Tweet from Chad Salmela regarding Jessie Diggins’ race in today’s Falun 10k classic mass start: Ultimately, of course, Jessie Diggins is the only person who truly knows what her best classic performance is. But for data people like me it’s always a fun game to try to tease out some objective […]
It’s always fun to take one of Devon Kershaw’s rants and make it concrete. In this case, his apparent despair over the struggles of the Swedish men on the international racing scene. He’s ranted about it more than once, but in this particular case he referred to 2019-2020 as being the worst season for them […]
I posted these graphs on Twitter a few days ago with basically zero commentary, so I thought I should at least describe what I did in a tad more detail. I make these graphs because they get at an aspect of something the US Ski Team leadership talks about fairly often: being “on track” for […]
Springtime means national team nominations, which is always one of people’s favorite things to argue about. This has become particularly true in recent years with some national teams having a fairly explicit preference for younger skiers built into their criteria. It seems like every year there are 1-2 skiers pushing 30 (or beyond) that have […]