The Effect of Kikkan Randall On US Women’s Skiing
I’ve commented on this before, but here’s a slightly more comprehensive look at the historical record. Here is a plot showing Kikkan Randall’s World Cup sprint results as well as those for any other American woman:
Note the handful of top twenties just this season, and there’s certainly more results clustered around 30th or so, but the median result hasn’t budged all that much. Contrast that with the equivalent graph for distance skiing:
Is it possible that Kikkan has done more to improve US women’s distance skiing than sprinting?
Kershaw + Randall World Cup Point Updates
Let’s check in on where we’re at with Kikkan Randall and Devon Kershaw’s World Cup points situations. First, Kershaw:
I finally figured out a decently efficient way to track WC points during a season, that requires only a minimal amount of data entry by hand. Cologna’s going to walk away with this one, obviously, but one thing this graph reveals is that that’s largely a function of Northug’s choice of schedule (and subsequent illness). Cologna may have eventually beaten Northug anyway, but they were matching each other pretty evenly up until Northug essentially left the WC circuit for a few weeks.
Kershaw is probably safe from Hellner, given how the Swede has been skiing of late. Legkov is probably the bigger worry now. As for overtaking Northug, I’d say that Kershaw could certainly overtake him next weekend (especially if Northug skips those races as well). But Kershaw’s two most recent sub-standard sprints probably have made it impossible for him to stay ahead of Northug. At least, assuming Northug doesn’t completely collapse. You never know.
As for Randall:
Randall got some lucky breaks this weekend from her opponents with Matveeva just missing the finals and Kowalczyk, well, not winning. Kowalczyk finishing third, not first, makes a huge difference in the point gap between them. With only two more sprints to go, I’m willing to go out on a limb and predict that Kikkan has this locked up.
Why?
Well, suppose for a moment that someone pulls a Tonya Harding and Kikkan earns zero points in the remaining races cause she’s home with two broken kneecaps. Matveeva is currently the closest, so her path to winning is the easiest. She’d need to garner 139 points to move past Randall.
But the final sprint is part of a stage race, and hence is only worth half the points. To get 139 points, Matveeva would have to win in Drammen and finish in the top four in the World Cup Final sprint. If Matveeva does not win in Drammen, it’s over, mathematically speaking.
Indeed, the gaps to Falla and Kowalczyk are both larger than 150 now, so they can’t overtake her no matter what they do.
I hope Kikkan knows all this and that it makes her even more aggressive and pumped for the final two races!
Can Kikkan Randall Win The Sprint World Cup?
Recall that at the start of the season, I considered this question with a bit of skepticism. I was definitely more skeptical about her prospects than some others. Hopeful, but skeptical.
My skepticism stemmed from the fact that while Kikkan is arguably the best freestyle sprinter in the world right now, her classic skiing has traditionally lagged a bit behind. Based on the only experience I have, which is looking at lots and lots of results patterns over time, I was skeptical that she could improve her classic sprinting that dramatically.
So what has happened so far? Read more
Rybinsk Field Strength And The Resurgent US Women
Two topics today.
Rybinsk Field Strength
I’m including the Moscow sprints here, but generally these races are notorious for low attendance. They require some of the most travel for many of the Europeans and they are often scheduled very near the Scandinavian nation’s national championships.
Did this year’s races attract a stronger or weaker field than in the past?
This is hard to measure objectively, since there are a million different ways you could go with quantifying “field strength”. Here’s one simple take:
This shows the proportion of the top thirty skiers that season (up to the Russian World Cups) who attended.
The measures FIS has been taking has definitely improves things since the embarrassing 2009-2010 races. The men’s fields have been getting more competitive at these races for two straight seasons now. The women’s sprint field took a huge jump this season. They weren’t all the most competitive the Russian races have been in the past (at least by this measure) but they’re about as good as we’ve seen. Read more
Rogla Distance Races
Oh yeah, there were some distance races in Rogla on Saturday too, huh?
Once again, this will be short on the words; just some pretty pictures. The US women had another strong outing:
Once again I’d note the continued downward trends for Holly and Kikkan and the generally flat trend for Liz. (Ida still has too few races for trends to be particularly meaningful.) In particular, I would emphasize that Kikkan’s classic skiing is showing the sort of trend her freestyle skiing has shown for a few years now:
Alex Harvey and Devon Kershaw were probably hoping for more on Saturday, and although their results weren’t terrible, they also weren’t all that great (for them):
The final thing I’ll note is that I noticed that the Russian women put three folks in the top ten on Saturday, a fairly strong showing for them. A sign of a resurgence for the Russian women? Well…
In Ivanova’s case, that race appears to be at her ceiling (or floor, I suppose if we associate down with better performance). As for Iksanova and Medvedeva, it’s still a bit early to tell, but it’s a good sign for those ladies to be starting out with results in the negative zone of these graphs.
Points Necessary For Randall To Podium In The WC Sprint Standings
Housekeeping note: Posting may be a tad delayed and/or sporadic this weekend and into the beginning of next week since the Statistical Family has increased in size by 50%.
I’ve engaged in a bit of speculation about the likelihood that Kikkan Randall may be able to win the WC Sprint overall title this coming season. My general take was that while it’s certainly possible, it will require a rather dramatic improvement in her classic sprinting.
Obviously, Kikkan’s racing so far has cast some doubt on whatever skepticism I had. (If you have doubt in one’s own skepticism, what would that be called…?) It’s still early, but if she’s going to win the whole thing, this is how she’d need to start her season.
In any case, it certainly seems like she should be more or less a lock for the top three, given all the retirements that have thinned the ranks of the women’s field. How well will she have to do, exactly, to match her performance from last year? Well, given the changes from year to year in WC scheduling and rule changes in how points are awarded, it’s not possible to directly use previous year’s point totals as a guide. However, if we convert them to proportions of the total number of points awarded for the season, things are easier to handle.
This chart shows the range of points necessary to finish at a particular place in the WC sprint overall rankings for the women. It’s based on taking the proportion of WC sprint points awarded to women in previous years, and then converting back to the equivalent proportion of points on tap for the 2011-2012 season.
Based on this, it seems like it ought to take a minimum of 528 WC sprint points for Randall to have a decent shot at landing on the podium, and she has 240 already.
As you can see, when you hit the top spot things get very unpredictable. Occasionally you have someone completely dominate and they win a really large percentage of the WC points. But if someone shoots for 600, that’s probably a good place to aim for if you’re trying to win the whole thing. So that would mean Kikkan’s looking at possibly having to win 4 more (non Tour) sprints to put herself solidly in the running for the overall win. Obviously, she can accumulate those points without having to win every time, but thinking about it in terms of wins is convenient.
Davos Recap
North Americans
Each weekend seems to be an interesting mix of results for the North Americans. Starting with the women (Davos result circled in blue):
Compared to this season, that was an off day for Kikkan, but compared to last season that was pretty typical. Part of me wonders if she dialed it back a bit late in the race when she knew she wasn’t feeling strong to save some energy for the sprint. But as you can see from her graph, if that’s going to be her “bad” race this season, she’s going have a strong set of results this year.
I’m very cautious about jumping on bandwagons when someone pops a good race or two, but Holly Brooks is beginning to convince me. That’s three good (and one OK) distance results in a row now. More importantly, I like the direction her trend is heading. It’s still early, so it’ll only take a few mediocre races to flatten that trend out, but so far it looks promising.
You can’t deny that Liz Stephen has had some strong results so far this season. My only concern is that they have all been roughly where we’ve seen her topping out before. Can her good days inch up towards the top ten?
As for the men: Read more
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