Some Top Young Finnish Men
I can’t keep up on the enormous number of good young skiers from every nation. I have a hard enough time with just those in my own backyard, the US and Canada. So it’s fun to look at some folks from other countries that I’m not so familiar with. For instance, here are some graphs looking at some good young male skiers from Finland. I’m using ‘cohort’ style graphs; they compare an athletes FIS points at a particular age to the range of FIS points achieved by skiers in the past that have gone on to achieve top ten results at WC, WSC or OWG races. (Remember, of course, that FIS points have plenty of limitations, and I calculate them slightly differently that FIS. For instance, I select people’s best results from a season, not from a calendar year.)
First, here are five young Finnish men who had strong distance results last season (click for full version):
Obviously, one wants to be at or below the shaded region, ideally. But those shaded regions don’t represent everyone who was ever successful, so it’s certainly possible to buck the trend and be a late bloomer. It just happens less frequently. Perttu Hyvarinen certainly seems promising. Sami Lahdemaki does as well, despite a slight uptick in his results last season.
To go along with this, here are five good young Finnish sprinters; again, FIS points for sprinting are only measuring qualification speed: Read more
How To Win A Medal (Or Come Kinda Close)
Another interesting data-centric post appeared over at NCCSEF, and when it comes to data, I just can’t help myself but comment.
This time we’ve got some slides that seem to be trying to draw a relationship between WJC results and winning a medal at (I believe) the Vancouver Olympic Games. We’re only shown the (partial) results for six skiers, so I’m not sure what exactly the lesson is supposed to be.
We seem to be mixing sprint and distance results together as an indicator for future success. That seems strange to me, but I’m certainly not an expert in that sort of thing. We’ve also selected a curiously successful subset of Olympic medalists to examine. Absent is Pietro Piller Cottrer, who’s best (and only) result at WJC was 32nd (admittedly, a long time ago). Also missing is Aino-Kaisa Saarinen who’s WJC results were 15th and 23rd. How about Tobias Angerer (WJC: 18th, 26th, 28th)? On the other hand, we are shown Marcus Hellner, who’s WJC results were good but not spectacular: 15th and 21st.
The further information provided at the bottom regarding time to an athlete’s first podium also contains mostly skiers who achieved this feat fairly young, but then also two who did not (Gaillard and Rickardsson).
What am I to learn from this? That the right path is to podium at WJC (Northug), except when it isn’t (Bjørgen, Haag)? That the right path is to be successful early in your 20′s on the WC (Northug, Harvey), except when it isn’t (Gaillard, Rickardsson)?
When I read stuff like this, I’m left feeling mostly confused, like I’ve been presented a bunch of data, but that no one has gone to the trouble to transform this data into information. The reader is left alone, drifting in a sea of numbers, wondering what exactly was the author’s point.
I’m absolutely not going to argue with the idea that skiers who show considerable promise early on are more likely to develop into successful WC skiers. Indeed, I’m less interested in the nuts and bolts of what results mean at a given age than I am in effective and clear presentation of data.
I’ve written about connections between WJC results and medal on another occasion and I tried to emphasize the fact that when you look at all the data, there’s certainly a connection, but the different paths that skiers take toward success can vary so much that it’s difficult to create many useful generalizations just from the data.
But let’s revisit this idea with a few simple approaches and see if we can organize the data in a way that’s informative (and maybe interesting too!). First, I’m going to broaden the scope from medals to top ten results at either Olympics or World Championships. The problem with looking only at medalists is that there are just too few of them. Much can be learned by imitating a single good skier, but there’s always the danger that what worked for them only worked because of something unique about them, rather than having stumbled across some universal truth of skiing.
Let’s tackle the connection between WJC results and whether or not someone achieves a top ten result at the Olympics or World Championships. I fit a simple model (actually, not so simple; no OLS regressions here!) and plotted the model’s predictions for the probability of a top ten result at a major championship based on that athlete’s best result at WJC (sprint or distance): Read more
Career Retrospective: Pirjo Muranen
Finnish sprinter Pirjo Muranen is one of several skiers hanging up their skis for good this year. I’ll be devoting a post to each of them over the next few Fridays, but first the Finnish sprinter.
Muranen was certainly a successful skier, though not an overpowering one. She has an individual Gold and Bronze from the World Championships in 2001 and 2009, but all of her other Olympic and World Championship medals are from relays. A solid distance skier, her best result was 4th in a 10km mass start in 2009, but she has numerous top tens. Additionally, Muranen has participated in the Tour de Ski three times improving from 22nd, to 15th, to 12th in the overall standings.
Let’s start with her WC, WSC and OWG distance results:
Recall that I’m using standardized percent back the median skier here, and in general values below 0 are good, values below -1 are excellent and values below -2 are unbelievable.
Muranen’s extraordinary race from this season was her 6th place in the waxing plagued 10km classic at World Championships. Other than that, her best races tended to be around -1 to -1.5. Obviously, Muranen experienced some difficulties leading up to the 2006 season. I haven’t followed her closely, so I’m not sure what caused this, but she sure rebounded back from 2007 forward.
Here’s the same graph broken down by technique: Read more
Revisiting The Mysteries Of Andrus Veerpalu
With somewhat cryptic reports appearing that Andrus Veerpalu failed a drug test back in January (he retired just before World Championships this year), it’s probably a good idea to revisit my old post on the subject. In that post I considered the conventional wisdom about Veerpalu that he had an uncanny ability to pop outstanding races in big championship events. When I looked at all of his results as measured simply by rank, my basic conclusion was that he sometimes seemed to do this, but the difference wasn’t huge, and I could find some examples of skiers that were more extreme instances of people over-performing at major championships. In the end, I thought his record was ambiguous, but I could see why people would say this about him.
In this post, I think I’m going to end up backing off of my skepticism a little bit, but not because of an unconfirmed drug positive. Rather, if we acknowledge that Veerpalu was an extreme classic specialist, so much so that over his entire career he’s done 98 classic races and only 16 freestyle once (and 19 pursuits in various formats), and use a somewhat more sophisticated measure of performance, things begin to look a little different. If we focus in on just his classic races, plotting them by standardized percent back from the median skier we get the following: Read more
Week In Review: Friday Apr 1st
No joke! Seriously, though, I thought about writing an April Fool’s post and then realized that I kind of hate April Fool’s posts. Probably because I’m an über-boring statistics geek who doesn’t know how to have fun at all. Or something. Winter’s ending elsewhere, though were I live it never really began. Spring here means I impatiently wait for the temps to start climbing above 60F, cause otherwise I won’t touch my road bike. Yeah, I’m a fair weather biker and proud of it. Of course, the fact that it’s rained pretty much every day this week hasn’t helped. Grrr.
Anyhoo, thanks again to Skaði Nordic for sponsoring this week’s Week In Review:
- On Monday, it was the rivalry that wasn’t.
- On Wednesday, I whined yet again about FIS and counting skills.
- On Friday I got all geeky with data on skier’s consistency versus their overall speed.
Do More Consistent Skiers Ski Faster?
In a word, no. But the relationship between consistency and speed is a little subtle. To look at this question let’s take the distance results from major international competitions (OWG, WSC or World Cups) and restrict ourselves to those times when an athlete did at least ten races in a particular season. Then for each season we’ll calculate a how variable their results were and also the average of their best five races. Read more
Whether She Has 46 Or 52 WC Wins, Marit Bjørgen Is Very Fast
So I guess I need to post something again about how many WC “victories” Marit Bjørgen has, ground that we’ve covered in considerable depth before. The occasion for revisiting this topic is FIS’s press release trumpeting the fact that Bjørgen has officially reached 46 WC victories, matching the great Björn Dæhlie. As we discussed in my previous post, this relies on some creative counting. Or rather, some creative un-counting.
Quite frankly, FIS can count things however they like. I just don’t understand their logic. The rule apparently is that winning a stage in the Tour de Ski, or any other World Cup-affiliated stage race, does not count as a World Cup victory. However, winning the overall stage race standings, does count as a World Cup victory. For the life of me, I can’t understand why it’s necessary to make that distinction, but whatever. If you include her individual stage wins, Bjørgen has 52 World Cup wins over her career.
Where FIS and I do agree is that Marit Bjørgen may be the best female XC ski racer ever, and while comparing men and women might not make much sense, you could probably make an argument that she’s one of the best XC skiers ever including the men. This past season was easily her best ever for distance results:
The blue line is tracking her median performance for each season. She had a grand total of four distance races that were only ~1-2 standard deviations better than average, and several of those were stage race handicap starts where she most likely was racing for the overall win not the stage win. But everything else was solidly in the super-human territory, and consistently there as well. The law of averages would suggest that Bjørgen won’t repeat this type of dominance next season, but you never know.
While she isn’t quite as dominant in sprinting, she’s still an unbelievably good sprinter:
Yeah, so the worst she’s done over the past two seasons in a sprint race is 10th. Over her entire career, she’s made the semifinals ~75% of the time and has advanced to the finals ~60% of the time.
Sure, I think she has 52 WC wins, and FIS thinks she has only 46. Tomayto, tomahto. She’s one of the best ever.
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