Things are clearly more tightly packed at the front this year, certainly compared to 2010. That said, the folks at the back are losing time at a faster rate than last year, it seems.

Related posts:

1. Tour de France Bump Chart: Stage 16
2. Vuelta a España Update: Stage 16
3. Giro d’Italia: Stage 21

Related posts:

1. Tour de France Charts: Stage 17
2. Vuelta a España Update: Stage 16
3. Giro d’Italia – Rest Day 1

As usual, these cycling posts are light on analysis; mainly just an opportunity for me to have fun making pretty graphs. So here’s the state of affairs after Stage 8 (yesterday) compared to the previous two Giros:

The description for each stage is not my judgement, it’s simply taken from the Wikipedia page for each Giro.

The previous two Giros saw some splits in the field somewhat earlier, by stage 2-3 in 2010 and stage 5 in 2011, before starting to shell people for real when it hits the actual mountainous terrain.

Related posts:

1. 2010 Giro d’Italia GC Plot
2. Giro d’Italia: Those Who Didn’t Make It
3. Giro d’Italia – Rest Day 1

Or sprints:

But you can see that one sprint race that stands out among the rest. Indeed, that 6th place finish was her best WC result, and her only top 10. She had a total of 15 races where she landed in the top 30, across both disciplines. She was most definitely a freestyle specialist, having competed in only 3 WC classic events and another 2 mixed technique events (i.e. pursuits). All the rest were skating.

Given her limited exposure to the WC scene, lets look at all of her results using FIS points:

Steadily between 75-125 FIS points for several seasons in distance races, possibly even sliding backwards a little, and then there was a rather major jump in 2007. Then there’s the near total absence in 2009, which I’d have to guess is an injury (or sometimes with women it’s a baby).

Her World Junior results were ok, but not great: 19th, 33rd, 46th, 51st. Interestingly, though, she scored a 1st and 5th at U23s in 2007.

Related posts:

1. Career Retrospective: Sara Renner
2. Career Retrospective: Claudia Nystad (Kuenzel)
3. Career Retrospective: Laurence Rochat

Compared to many of the retiring skiers I profile here, her distance WC racing was relatively limited:

And not her most successful event. She did do a lot more sprinting, though:

She apparently focused mostly on freestyle (34 freestyle sprints vs 9 classic) but wasn’t so choosy with the distance events (18 freestyle, 11 classic and 5 pursuits). Since she doesn’t have quite as many WC starts as some other folks, we could simply look at all of her FIS point results:

A partial season in 2009, injury or illness perhaps? Of interest to some may be her WJC results, which topped out at 6th, 7th and 13th in 2002. Ironically, the two better results were in the distance events.

Related posts:

1. Career Retrospective: Rene Sommerfeldt
2. Career Retrospective: Sara Renner
3. Career Retrospective: Virpi Kuitunen

As discussed recently over at FasterSkier, Brooks just missed qualifying via objective criteria, as she finished 55th in the World Cup overall. That means that if she’s named, it will have to be based upon some discretionary judgement by the coaches. I think you can make a pretty good case that Brooks deserves a spot.

First let’s review her distance results, compared to a few of her peers:

This doesn’t make her look very good, although she still comes out looking pretty favorably compared to Sargent and even Stephen, to a certain degree. But as we all know, Brooks broke her wrist over Christmas, and then proceeded to race through the injury for several weeks. What does her season look like if we drop her post-injury results?

That looks to me like an athlete performing roughly on par with Jessie Diggins (who qualified for the A team via objective criteria), better than Sargent, and showing stronger improvements year-to-year than Stephen (who, I might add, is considerably younger than Brooks). I omitted Sadie Bjornsen from these plots for space reasons, but that comparison is basically the same as between Brooks and Sargent.

The argument is mostly confined to distance events:

If you omit Brooks’ post injury sprints she’s left with only a 23rd and a 46th, which is sort of a wash, in my opinion. Particularly compared to these other women, I don’t think you’d be adding Brooks for her sprinting. Any success in these events would be a bonus.

A possible counterargument would be that given the financial limitations of the US team and their reluctance to invest in older athletes, it would make more sense to simply count on naming her as a discretionary pick to the World Championships team, rather than naming her to the A team for the whole season. Honestly, I’d be willing to bet that this is actually what will happen. (Not that they’d name her to the WSC team in advance, but that they’d basically be planning on it, even if they don’t announce it publicly.)

But consider that her pre-injury distance results this season were 13th, 17th, 19th, 22nd and 36th. Even if she had spent much of the remainder of the season in the 20s rather than the teens, so at the low end of what she was doing pre-injury, she’d have been a shoe-in for making the A team on objective criteria alone. Also, it may be worth considering how much better prepared she might be for WSCs racing in Europe rather than domestically. And really, barring some catastrophic collapse there’s just no way I can see her not going to WSCs next year. I mean, raise your hand if you want to see what a relay team of Randall, Brooks, Diggins and Stephen could do? A long shot, perhaps, but with Brooks there you really do have a shot at a significant result in the relay. And if you have all four of them on the WC circuit more or less full time, they’d get two solid dry runs at the relay before WSCs.

So if it were me, I’d name her because:

1. Her results suggest that an injury free season could have shown her to be equal to, or better than, both Diggins and Stephen.
2. I want her at WSCs, particularly to complete our relay team.
3. I want her to be prepared for WSCs, and I’m skeptical that racing domestically and then jetting over to Europe just for WSCs is optimal.

Obviously, this is just me. And I don’t have to deal with any of the financial realities of the situation, so that makes this a much easier call for me to make. But I think that in this case Brooks’ potential for consistent top 30 results (even if its only for 1-2 seasons, given her age) is worth making an exception to the US team’s general policy of favoring younger, developing athletes.

Related posts:

1. NOW Is It Panic Time For The Norwegian Men’s Distance Team?
2. WSC Pursuit Recap: North Americans
3. Should Jessie Diggins Be On The A-Team?

Among Batory’s top 30 results, 63 were classic, 31 freestyle and 20 in mixed technique events (i.e. pursuits). While his best results were undeniably weighted towards classic races, his median results actually weren’t that lopsided:

At least, they weren’t too lopsided during his heyday. As he got older, Batory did seem to let his skating slip a bit. He dabbled in sprinting, during the early days of the event:

But as you can see pretty quickly was displaced by the “true” sprinters and never had much luck with it after that. If we take a somewhat cruder look has his (World Cup-level) distance results using finishing place:

We can see that Batory’s “golden era” spanned roughly from 1999-2003. The 2003-2004 season was a big drop-off for him, and top results got thinner each year after that.

With some of these older skiers with very long careers, I think it’s fun to remind people when they retire how they did at World Juniors. In his first trip, Batory finished 21st and 22nd. The next year he finished 14th and 2nd. Both years his better race at World Juniors was the classic event.

While he had many, many top-30 results over his long career, Batory finished with only 3 podium results, but 26 top 10 results. My point here is, of course, that his success at World Juniors probably correlates well with his large number of top 10 or top 30 results. But the next step to finishing in the top three repeatedly is probably a big jump from 10th place, and not easily distinguished using 4 races when he was 19.

Related posts:

1. Career Retrospective: Rene Sommerfeldt
2. Career Retrospective: Laurence Rochat
3. Career Retrospective: Tore Ruud Hofstad

Hjelmeset was the quintessential classic specialist:

If you’re basically only going to do classic races, you’d better be pretty good at them, and Hjelmeset certainly was. His World Cup career included 119 classic starts, only 26 freestyle starts and another 9 pursuits (mixed technique). All but one of his 26 WC podiums were in classic races. Those podiums included 4 World Championships podiums and one Olympic podium.

That’s one area that being such a specialist will hurt you: the Olympics only come once every four years, the techniques will alternate on the events, and nations won’t be as likely to use one of their spots on someone who can only do 1-2 events.

But his one WC podium in a freestyle race opens up the window to the other quirky aspect of Hjelmeset’s racing. It actually came in a sprint race, waaaay back in the day in 2001. Hjelmeset excelled at classic skiing, and amusingly it didn’t much matter what the distance was.

He finished his career with 7 WC level sprint podiums and 9 distance podiums in races 30km or longer. The only other skiers even remotely close in terms of that split are Petter Northug (14 sprint, 17 30km+) and Dario Cologna (7 sprint, 7 30km+). And they just happen to be essentially the two best all around male skiers.

Most of that sprinting success, though, was earned a while back:

So chalk that up for sprinting being a bit harder as you get older, I suppose.

Related posts:

1. Career Retrospective: Rene Sommerfeldt
2. Career Retrospective: Tore Ruud Hofstad
3. Career Retrospective: Petra Majdic

One of the things that I pay closest attention to is depth: how many different skiers do we have performing at a particular level. The reason for this is that for relatively “small” skiing nations like ourselves, it can be pretty common for a single extraordinary skier to come along and provide excellent results for several years. This can make the program as a whole look pretty good, but if the success isn’t “filtering down” it probably won’t last.

In that vein, here’s a graph of the proportion of skiers (with World Cup starts) achieving a top 30 result, broken down by gender and race type (sprint or distance):

I’ve included the size scale with the points to give you a sense of the “denominator”: how many skiers we actually sent out there in a given season. As you can see, oftentimes is hasn’t been very many at all.

The Canadian men have obviously been quite successful recently, but note that Len Valjas is really the only new development lately, in terms of scoring WC points. Also, it’s interesting to me how the Canadian men seem to tend to have a larger number of athletes getting starts than the US, at least over the past 5 years or so.

The story with the Canadian women is pretty simple. There’s the big bulge for the Beckie Scott & Co. era and then a pretty steep drop off. There was a sudden explosion in the number of women getting sprint start between 2008-2010 in the run-up to the Olympics. While that has dropped off considerably, the women they are starting are finally scoring some points (Crawford and Gaiazova, mainly). Their distance results have sort of bounced around.

As for the American men, the 90′s saw a lot of years with only a few skiers getting starts (and hence the proportion bounces around quite a lot). Unsurprisingly, there was a huge increase in the number of starts prior to the 2002 Olympics, and then a somewhat deceptive jump in performance in the Olympic year. We did ski pretty well that year, but it was aided by some pretty sparsely attended pre-Olympic World Cups. (It would be interesting to do a version of this graph that looks only at races on European soil.)

That was basically the beginning of the Kris Freeman era in US men’s distance skiing. Between then and 2008 there a steady decline in the proportion of skiers reaching the top 30, despite a fairly steady 5-10 athletes getting starts each year. Recently, things appear to have picked up somewhat, although this year is basically identical to the last.

With the departure of Torin Koos and Simi Hamilton taking a few seasons to get healthy and performing where he’d like, sprinting has also seen a decline over the last several years.

That leaves the obvious big bright spot, the US women. For much of this graph, the proportions bounce around very erratically, since we very often had only 2-3 women getting starts. Following a real low in 2007, with no American women scoring points we’ve seen several consecutive seasons of improvement, with a slight drop off this year. The improvement in the women’s sprint events is only ~3 seasons old, but if anything it seems more promising.

Related posts:

1. Mid-Season Recap: North American Distance
2. Mid-Season Review: North American Sprint
3. North American WSC Assessment

But if you look at his results with FIS points, you can clearly see that while he was relatively old (~27) he had not “stalled out” in terms of improvement:

No major jumps in performance, just a very steady, consistent improvement. By last season, his median FIS point result in distance races was good enough to be one of the top 15 Swedish men:

Related posts:

1. NOW Is It Panic Time For The Norwegian Men’s Distance Team?
2. Drammen 10/15km Classic Recap
3. Lahti Pursuit Recap