Career Retrospective: Arianna Follis
Several talented sprinters are retiring this year, among them Arianna Follis. While she’s known as a sprinter, her results indicate that she wasn’t a terribly slow distance skier either, particularly later in her career:
This suggests that it’s been the previous four seasons where her distance racing has really been fairly strong, and in fact she seems to be ending her career with perhaps her strongest distance racing season yet. The 2010 race that stands out here is a handicap stage from the Tour de Ski in which Follis, Majdic and Kowalczyk gapped Saarinen in 4th, who herself was over 1.5 minutes ahead of 5th. The handicap start stage races can produce some unusual race tactics, for sure. In fact, her only two distance wins came in handicap start stages, the other in this year’s World Cup Finale.
Her distance results translated into a total of 10 podiums, spread across the Tour, WC and one WSC Bronze. All of these came in freestyle or pursuit races, so the following graph is only partially surprising: Read more
Prediction Game: Results!
Back on Monday I posted the graph shown below and posed a question:
It turns out I didn’t ask my question very clearly, because I had to keep updating the post with clarifications. So that’s my fault. Maybe this time I’ll do better. What I did was plot a part of the time series of FIS points for these five women. The x axis is time, and the large white grid lines represent around five years. So the “next race” for these five skiers will not be the same race. They’re not all about to race against each other.
My question was for you to pick which of the five would have a top three result in a WC, WSC or OWG in their respective next races. I provided a few more pieces of information: at least one of the women will succeed (so the answer isn’t “none of the above”) and the one(s) that do, it will be their very first career podium.
Here’s the answer in graph form:
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