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?
Are Women’s WC Fields Really ‘Weaker’?
I received an email recently asking about field strength for the men’s and women’s WC fields, particularly as it applies to mass start races. Lately we’ve seen the men’s field engage in a fair bit of pack skiing, whereas the women’s field strings out more quickly.
First, I want to dispatch with a common bit of lazy rhetoric in this area. Saying that the women’s field is ‘weak’ is not the same as saying the women are weak. I’m not sure what other people mean, but what I mean by a ‘weak field’ is simply that there are fewer skiers able to finish close to the leader. To say that there are fewer women able to (nearly) match the performance of Marit Bjørgen than there are men who can (nearly) match the performance of Petter Northug is not to say that the women are somehow less talented than the men. To the extent that this happens, I consider it primarily a legacy of gender inequalities in sports and society in general. We’ve made a lot of progress in bringing more women into this sport, but professional women’s skiing still must be several decades younger than men’s professional skiing.
With that caveat out of the way, let’s look at some data. My preferred metric for this sort of thing is to look at the number of skiers within a fixed percent of the leader. It’s sort of a ‘musical chairs’ analogy: the more skiers you have fighting for a fixed number of chairs, the more ‘competitive’ the field. Let’s begin with interval start races (click for full version): Read more
New Zealand Continental Cups
Hey, the first international ski races of the 2011-2012 season took place recently in New Zealand! They are officially FIS sanctioned races, but my impression is that they have a bit more of a training camp time trial feel to them. The Americans, Canadians, some Russians, and then an assortment of Japanese, Korean, and locals (Australia + New Zealand) are spending time down at the Snow Farm. The fields are small, no one is in top form and probably everyone is treating them as training rather than a ‘serious’ competition.
But heck, let’s (over) analyze them anyway, just for fun. These will be very short, narrowly focused posts on these races. The men did a mass start 15k classic race (no Russians). I suppose it’s interesting that Newell finished second, which is nominally pretty good for him in a distance race, but of course it’s hard to read much of anything into that. I’m generally more interested in the younger skiers. Take Noah Hoffman, for instance:
This graph shows how Hoffman has fared against these specific skiers (a subset of the folks in the New Zealand race) over time. The New Zealand race is in red. That appears right in line with how he fared against Freeman last season, so that’s a good sign. In general, he’s been faring better against Newell over time, but this particular race was a bit against that trend. Given that Hoffman was about as far behind Freeman as he normally is, I’d guess that’s evidence for this being a strong race for Newell rather than a weak one for Hoffman.
The corresponding women’s 10k classic mass start was interesting for data nerds like myself. It consisted of Justyna Kowalczyk and only 5 others (it’s possible other folks raced who don’t have valid FIS licenses, so they won’t show up on the official results) from Japan, Korea and New Zealand. Obviously, this made for a somewhat uneven field. Kowalczyk won by around 4 minutes.
This immediately gets someone like me wondering how that margin of victory stacks up historically. In this case, second place finisher Sumiko Ishigaki was ~13% back. That’s the third largest percent back by a second place finisher that I could find in a FIS sanctioned women’s race (out of 2691 total). That means that I found two races with larger margins between first and second place!
One of them is impressive, but plausible, being another instance of a tiny field. The other, the largest, is so outlandish that I spent a while trying to decide if it wasn’t in fact an error of some sort. I’ve mostly decided that it must be a mistake and the winning time was really 34:32 not 24:32. Perhaps a reader will fill me in on the details…
Was Bjørgen vs Kowalczyk Really An Issue This Season?
Doogiski over at NordicXplained has a good post up regarding the rivalry (such as it is) between Marit Bjørgen and Justyna Kowlaczyk. The issue between the fans of these two great skiers is the question of which one is better. Shocker, I know.
Doogiski gives a good rundown of some of the limitations of comparing skiers using only World Cup points and does some adjustments for the number of races each skier did, plus a few other factors. I think this is a reasonable way to look at World Cup points, but ultimately I agree with one of his commenters that this is really fairly simple. In the specific case of two athletes who have actually raced against each other a fair amount, the least ambiguous way to measure who was better is simply to look at these specific head-to-head matchups.
In this case, they raced against each other in 7 sprint races and 14 distance races. (I’m not including the overall standings for the stage races both ladies competed in at Kuusamo and in Falun, just each individual race.) Kowalczyk beat Bjørgen in only one sprint race (Otepaa) and in only two distance races (handicap pursuit in Kuusamo and the regular pursuit in Lahti). That’s a record of 6-1 (Sprint) and 12-2 (Distance) for Bjørgen, and with numbers like that it’s very hard for me to take seriously claims that Kowalczyk was the better skier this season. And one of those wins for Kowalczyk was a somewhat unusual race, with Bjørgen holding the overall lead in the Kuusamo mini-tour and most likely not really trying to win the stage, but simply hold on to the overall lead.
In fact, if you extend this back to the previous two seasons, Bjørgen’s record is 11-3 (Sprint) and 20-5 (Distance). Kowalczyk can, and does, beat her on occasion, but it’s not exactly a back-and-forth rivalry lately.
Obviously, Kowalczyk skied very well at the Tour de Ski, and I think in doing so proved that she was (on average) better than everyone other than Bjørgen this season. (Although one could possibly argue that Johaug deserves that title.) Bjørgen didn’t do the Tour, but probably will next year, which I predict will lead to either an epic battle between the two, or a really boring Tour as Bjørgen crushes everyone.
Let’s kick things up a notch, though, focusing in on the times they’ve raced against each other in distance events overall: Read more
Tour de Ski Recap: Part 1
Now that the entire Tour is in the books, here’s how it played out, at least the big picture:
I have to say, good job to Fransesc Soulie (AND) and Callum Watson (AUS) for hanging in there, despite being way off the back. Eight races in ten days is a tough feat, even for the folks at the back, so everyone who made it to Val di Fiemme deserves a pat on the back.
Kowalczyk was rarely seriously tested in this Tour. The Italians pulled reasonably close to her after Stage 6, but the Pole rebounded in Stages 7 and 8. Therese Johaug’s stunningly good final two stages, propelling her all the way into second place are readily apparent as well. On the men’s side, Dario Cologna pulled away after Stage 4 and despite yielding some time to Petter Northug on the final climb held on for the win. Northug’s big jump into second place after Stage 7 came largely on the shoulders of the 90 bonus seconds he racked up that day.
Finally, here’s a look at the top twelve skiers from this year’s Tour (who also participated in last year’s Tour) comparing their results from each year (click through for full versions): Read more
Aging Ski Teams: Poland and Germany
Can you name a Polish men’s cross country ski racer? Hmmm. Poland has certainly been a one woman show of late, thanks to Justyna Kowalczyk.
Which makes the following graph (a continuation of the graphs in this post) not terribly surprising:
So here are some Polish men for you: Janusz Krezelok and Maciej Kreczmer. Who was that older Polish woman who clearly retired in 1998? That would be Malgorzata Ruchala.
Poland is another extreme case. Germany is another team that’s been getting older, despite being a much bigger program:
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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