Tour de Ski Rest Day 2 Recap
As expected, Stage 6 saw quite a bit of movement (as well as skiers abandoning due to illness):
A couple of the men are really quite a ways off the back; I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw some of them pack it in. Stage 6 created a lot more “clumpiness” with the men, although the women have some groups formed as well.
Kowalczyk has been losing ground on the main chase group since Stage 4 and is now in danger of yielding the overall lead if she doesn’t stem the tide. Cologna on the other hand looks to have this race more or less under control. Kershaw finally returned to planet Earth today and fell from second overall as he was swallowed up by the main chase group.
Here’s the breakdown by nation (with some countries omitted): Read more
Tour de Ski: Leaders & North Americans
Once again, not much commentary here, just some graphs showing some notable individuals progress through the tour. I haven’t highlighted all the leaders, per se, just some of the top people and some other interesting ones.
No one’s likely to touch Kowalczyk for the overall, although there’s a lot of racing left to be done. But the race for second and third is definitely going to be interesting for the women.
As for the North Americans:
Tour de Ski: Comparison To 2010
An excellent suggestion from the comments was to redo the graphs by nation, but overlay them on top of the same data from last year’s Tour for comparison.
Easily done! I’ve pruned back the nations plotted even further to focus more heavily on the big guns, and it also enhances readability. Also, keep in mind that the races from the equivalent stages from last year’s Tour were not all the same format as this year, I believe (Stage 4 was the second sprint last year). As before, click through for full versions:
Tour de Ski men 2010 vs 2011 through Stage 4.
Tour de Ski women 2010 vs 2011 through Stage 4.
Tour de Ski Rest Day Recap
I’m not going to provide much analysis here, just the graphs. Feel free to pontificate in the comments. First up is the overall Tour rank after each stage:
The two day pursuit created more chaos in the overall placings than I expected. Somewhat more significant movement in the sprint in Stage 3 with the men, given the pure sprint specialists there.
The following two graphs split the men’s and women’s fields by nation (except for Andorra and Australia, for space reasons; sorry!). Instead of rank, they display the seconds from the median skier after each stage. They are somewhat large, so click through for the full versions: Read more
2011 Tour de Ski Preview
Ok, so this isn’t much of a preview. Rather it’s just a bird’s eye view of what happened last year using some bumps plots. Here’s how things played out for the men:
2010 Men's Tour de Ski
The median skier can sort of be thought of as the “peloton”. As you can see, not much happened until Stage 5, the first really long distance event of the Tour. That stage clearly split the group into three main packs, with some stragglers in the back. These groups mostly stayed together through Stage 6, but then began to drift apart in Stages 7 and 8. Emil Jönsson bagged his sprint WC points and then packed it in despite leading after four stages.
The women, not surprisingly, were a bit more scattered: Read more
Recap: Davos Sprint Con’t
One of the interesting things we can look at with sprint races is differences between the various heats themselves, rather than individual skiers. Interestingly, reconstructing this information, namely who was in what quarterfinal or semifinal, using just the split times took a little bit of thought. Not a monumental challenge, but it was a bit trickier than my average graph.
Let’s start with the quarterfinals:
Men's quarterfinals; Davos WC sprint.
This graph tracks the members of each quarterfinal through the entire sequence of heats. I’m still tinkering a little with the y-xis. Rather than plotting everything relative to the fastest time of the day, I’m plotting them relative to the median time from the whole day. The stats geek in me finds this more appropriate, but it doesn’t really change much. The relative differences between each skier will be the same, but the interpretation is slightly different: 0% is the median skier, not the fastest.
Federico Pellegrino (the big winner in qualification and loser in the final) certainly did get quite lucky with a slow, slow, slow quarterfinal (red). Quarterfinal 5 was probably the next easiest, at least in terms of competitiveness. (Keep in mind that these graphs don’t tell us anything about crashes or other “extraneous events”, that can sometimes account for the speed of a heat.)
On the other hand, the women didn’t see such a stark difference between the quarterfinals:
Women's quarterfinals; Davos sprint.
Once again, these are the raw times, so this doesn’t reflect Kowalczyk’s relegation to 6th place in the final. So that pair of dueling orange lines are Kowalczyk and Randall.
I think the most interesting quarter here is #4 (purple) where only Majdic made it all the way to the final thanks to lucky loser status. So far this season it seems like Majdic has consistently been present in the sprints, but hasn’t really put anything impressive together in a final.
How about the semifinals: Read more
Recap: Davos Sprint
Once again thanks to Jan at WorldofXC.com for providing the split time data for the sprint races on Sunday. Very different developments of heat times in this race compared to the last two sprint races. Let’s check out the women first:
Note that these are just the raw times from the heats, so it does not reflect the fact that Kowalczyk was bumped down to 6th for a lane violation near the finish. In Davos the qualification round was the slowest by a large margin. Nearly everyone picked up the pace in the quarters and then again in the semis, which saw the fastest time of the day. Finally the pace eased off, bot only a bit, for the final.
Jacobsen managed a fairly easy pace in for the prelims and the quarters but was well off the pace by the time the final rolled around. On the other hand, Majdic was putting up consistently fast time and while she hung on in the final better than Jacobsen, she also faded a bit towards the end.
Compared to Randall, Majdic and Kowalczyk, both Björgen and Follis had fairly easy quarters, but then offset that rest with an extremely fast semi.
Having just watched the final, it seemed like skis might have been a factor. It appeared to me that Björgen’s skis were running a little bit better than the others, and with a nice big downhill in that course that can make a huge difference.
As for the men: Read more
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