An update on the Marit vs Justyna rivalry
You’ll recall that recently this rivalry has been fairly one sided, no matter how much Justyna’s fans want to believe otherwise. The previous two season simply saw Marit winning far more of their head to head match-ups. At the start of the season, things looked even worse for the Justyna camp, as she struggled quite a bit in the early races.
But Justyna may have simply been using those as training for the Tour, as she fared much better last week against Marit. Let’s take a look at how their complete history stand as of now:
So these are just the distance races, measured in difference in percent back. Values above zero mean Marit won and vice versa. Marit had the better of this match-up for two straight seasons, with the occasional lapse. This season, you can see the early group of really poor races for Justyna, and then during the Tour things were more tilted towards Justyna, though the margins weren’t terribly large, for the most part.
As for sprinting:
Marit is still ahead on this score, though we’ve only had a handful of sprint races thus far.
So my question is: will Justyna, having clearly peaked for the Tour, slide back again to being mostly beaten by Marit? Or will she be able to sustain this level of fitness through the rest of the season?
Head to Head: Bente Skari vs Stefania Belmondo
I haven’t done one of these in a while, so just for fun…
This time let’s compare two great female skiers from the 90′s (and early 00′s), Norwegian Bente Skari and Italian Stefania Belmondo. Unlike with Daehlie and Alsgaard, things are little more balanced for these two:
Head-to-Head: Mika Myllylae vs. Thomas Alsgaard
I haven’t done one of these in a while, but with Mika Myllylae in the news recently I thought this might be fun…
This head-to-head matchup might not be the first you’d think of to look at, but you end up with an interesting graph nonetheless. As always, I grabbed the 54 races where Myllylae (FIN) and Alsgaard (NOR) raced against each other directly in WC, OWG or WSC races. Since these guys are both largely pre-sprinting era skiers, we’ll only look at distance races.
Then we simply plot the difference in FIS points between the skiers:
Remember that since lower FIS points are better, positive values represent a win for Alsgaard and negative values represent a win for Myllylae. Each skier had their strengths, eh? Alsgaard, true to form, kicked Myllylae’s arse in skating during the first half of the 90′s and Myllylae correspondingly kicked Alsgard’s butt in classic races.
But then they each significantly improved their weak techniques (since it doesn’t make much sense that they would both get worse at they better techniques) until they reached some level of parity by the end of the decade. The actual reversal of the trend lines here is somewhat misleading, most likely an artifact of the small number of races in 2000 and 2001.
Just a simple picture of two somewhat one sided skiers becoming considerably less one sided.
Mika Myllylä
Most everyone has probably heard by now that former Finnish skier and convicted doper Mika Myllylä was found dead in his home earlier this week. There had been a very large court case taking place in Finland involving numerous people’s involvement in past Finnish doping scandals and Myllylä had testified, admitting to drug use during the 1990′s. It’s a sad ending for a guy who hasn’t exactly handled himself well in retirement. No matter what you may think of his crimes, drug problems and an early death at the age of 41 aren’t things I’d wish on anyone.
It’s particularly sad for me, since I confess that I (naively) rooted for many Finnish skiers as a teenager in the 1990′s. It seemed like everyone around me idolized the Norwegians and I like being a bit contrarian, so the Finns sort of fit the bill. Eventually it became obvious that something was up (even for people following the sport from several thousand miles away with what we would now consider a comically crippled version of the Internet), probably around the 1999 Ramsau World Championships, and I moved on in my fandom.
Here’s Myllylä’s major international results:
These are the results that remain in the “official” records, so any race that he participated in, but had the result expunged won’t appear. If we’re going to do armchair speculation, you might guess that he may have started using during the 1993-1994 season, where he saw a dramatic performance jump. Interestingly, he struggled quite a bit in 1996, but it appeared to be a brief hiccup.
Perhaps more interesting is how he fared against some of his contemporaries:
Each panel plots the difference in % back between Myllylä and an opponent. Positive values indicate that Myllylä won that race and vice versa. He saw dramatic improvement against an aging Silvio Fauner and more modest gains versus Dæhlie and his teammate Isometsä. One thing that stands out is the change from 1996 to 1997 versus Smirnov. Obviously, there are two halves to a head-to-head comparison, so that could easily be Smirnov’s performance taking a dive, but it’s noticeable nonetheless.
The late 90′s and early 2000′s were a bit of a transitionary time in skiing, and these folks are definitely the “old guard” of that era. Here’s a comparison against a handful of the younger contemporaries:
Ok, so Skjeldal isn’t really a young guy by the late 90′s, but I’m trying to keep these graphs 4 at a time. And yes, there are loads of other people we could look at: Alsgaard, Mühlegg, etc.
Head-To-Head: Petter Northug vs. Marcus Hellner
Apparently this is our modern rivalry on the men’s side of things. I suppose the Norwegians and Swedes will always find something to torment each other over, so this one is as good as any. Obviously, this story has many chapters left to be written, but let’s take a look at how things have progressed so far…
First up is distance results: Read more
Did Petter Northug Have a Slight Edge On Marcus Hellner?
That’s what Marcus Hellner says, according to FasterSkier. Let’s go to the numbers, shall we?
These are all the times these two guys raced against each other last season (distance races, anyway). Positive values indicate a victory for Hellner and vice versa. You can see Northug’s strength in mass start races, and that Northug had two unusually bad races. A handful of Northug’s wins were by very small margins and two of them were in stage race prologues, which, let’s face it, are kind of lame. Still, I would give Northug a slight edge here.
Head-to-Head: Marit vs Justyna
This is the head to head matchup that was runner up in my recent reader poll. No reason not to keep everyone happy by tackling this pair next!
Per usual, what I’m doing is taking races where Marit Bjoergen and Justyna Kowalczyk have both participated and plotting the difference of their FIS points (distance races) or the difference of their finishing place (sprint races) versus time.
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