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?
Odds + Ends From Kuusamo
Annsi Pentsinen
Doogiski over at NordicXplained asked how Pentsinen’s 4.3 second win in qualification on Friday stacks up historically. Quite impressively, it turns out.
That’s the second largest qualifying round winning margin for the men’s field in WC, OWG or WSC races. The only larger one was almost 10 years ago, with a 4.7 second victory by Björn Lind in a freestyle sprint in Germany in December of 2001. So we’re reaching back to the very beginning years of sprinting here.
Ola Vigen Hattestad came close to this once last season, winning qualification by 3.86 seconds.
A winning margin greater than 4 seconds in qualifying has happened more often with the women: six times. And it’s basically a who’s who of dominant female skiers over the past decade: Skari, Neumannova, Bjørgen (twice), Kowalczyk and Majdic. Skari’s is particularly absurd. She won qualifying in a WC sprint in Italy way back in the day (December 2001 again) by 8.4 seconds! It was classic, so maybe waxing was an issue, or maybe Skari was just that fast. Interestingly, the woman she beat that day be 8.4 seconds was Petra Majdic.
More generally, the typical winning margin in qualification is just under a second for the men and about 1.5 seconds for the women. Read more
Can Bjørgen Repeat Her Dominant Performance?
Marit Bjørgen pretty much wiped the floor with folks last year in distance events:
As a stats guy, when I see extreme events I tend not to expect them to repeat themselves. The general principle here is called regression to the mean. Extreme events are just unlikely, so it doesn’t make sense to expect them to happen repeatedly. From a numbers perspective, Bjørgen’s season was pretty much unrivaled, so if I were a betting man I’d wager that she won’t be as dominant next year.
At the very least, I wouldn’t expect her to win by a consistently large margins over the field, even if she actually wins nearly as many races. But you never know!
When people have had extremely good seasons in the past, sometimes they can sustain is for a few years in a row, other times not. For example, here are some examples of some men who had a strong season but weren’t really able to sustain that level: Read more
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
Whether She Has 46 Or 52 WC Wins, Marit Bjørgen Is Very Fast
So I guess I need to post something again about how many WC “victories” Marit Bjørgen has, ground that we’ve covered in considerable depth before. The occasion for revisiting this topic is FIS’s press release trumpeting the fact that Bjørgen has officially reached 46 WC victories, matching the great Björn Dæhlie. As we discussed in my previous post, this relies on some creative counting. Or rather, some creative un-counting.
Quite frankly, FIS can count things however they like. I just don’t understand their logic. The rule apparently is that winning a stage in the Tour de Ski, or any other World Cup-affiliated stage race, does not count as a World Cup victory. However, winning the overall stage race standings, does count as a World Cup victory. For the life of me, I can’t understand why it’s necessary to make that distinction, but whatever. If you include her individual stage wins, Bjørgen has 52 World Cup wins over her career.
Where FIS and I do agree is that Marit Bjørgen may be the best female XC ski racer ever, and while comparing men and women might not make much sense, you could probably make an argument that she’s one of the best XC skiers ever including the men. This past season was easily her best ever for distance results:
The blue line is tracking her median performance for each season. She had a grand total of four distance races that were only ~1-2 standard deviations better than average, and several of those were stage race handicap starts where she most likely was racing for the overall win not the stage win. But everything else was solidly in the super-human territory, and consistently there as well. The law of averages would suggest that Bjørgen won’t repeat this type of dominance next season, but you never know.
While she isn’t quite as dominant in sprinting, she’s still an unbelievably good sprinter:
Yeah, so the worst she’s done over the past two seasons in a sprint race is 10th. Over her entire career, she’s made the semifinals ~75% of the time and has advanced to the finals ~60% of the time.
Sure, I think she has 52 WC wins, and FIS thinks she has only 46. Tomayto, tomahto. She’s one of the best ever.
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
Drammen 10/15km Classic Recap
After reviewing yesterday’s sprint race in Drammen, Norway it’s time to get caught up on the distance racing action from the day before. And lucky for you I’m going to use some new graphs that I’ve been working on for a while. They’re similar to the biathlon graphs I introduced last week, with a few modifications and improvements.
Let’s start with the top four men:
This should be fairly self-explanatory, I hope. But here are some technical details if you’re into that kind of thing:
- I’ve gradually become convinced that percent back from the median skier is often a better metric than percent back from the winner (which is what FIS points are based on). Additionally, I’ve standardized these values to account for systematic differences between interval start races, mass start races, etc. Hence, the y-axis literally represents standard deviations away from the mean, using percent back from the median skier as a base measure.
- The race in question (i.e. Saturday’s race) is highlighted with a blue circle. The blue line tracks the median by season, but only for seasons with at least three races.
- Since I’ve standardized the performance measure, I had a little fun with labeling performances that are within one, two, etc. standard deviations from the mean. So one SD better than the mean is ‘Good’, between 1-2 SDs better than the mean is ‘Elite’ and more than 2 SDs better than the mean I’ve playfully named ‘Inhuman’.
- Take these ‘Good’, ‘Elite’ and ‘Inhuman’ labels with a grain of salt and a sense of humor. Even after standardizing the results, there’s still a fair bit of variation from race to race. So a result in the ‘Inhuman’ zone will typically be good enough for the win, but not always. Other times, a race can be won with a performance that is merely ‘Elite’. Generally speaking, ‘Inhuman’ performances are likely to put you in a position to win, ‘Elite’ performances will tend to put you on or near the podium and ‘Good’ performances are likely to put you in the World Cup points (i.e. top thirty). But these are just general rules of thumb.
Anyway, back to Saturday’s race. Daniel Rickardsson outclassed the field by a healthy margin, putting himself well into the ‘Elite’ performance range. As you can see, this represents one of the best races of the season for him or even for his whole career, and if you’re from Sweden you’ve got to like the way his performances are trending.
Martin Johnsrud Sundby also had a strong race, which stands out in part because of the heat that the Norwegian men have taken lately. Despite the complaints, it seems to me that Johnsrud Sundby has actually had a very strong season in distance events this year. Dario Cologna has been probably the strongest overall distance skier this season, but Saturday’s race, while just edging into the ‘Elite’ zone was probably just average for him. He’ll be expecting better over the next week at World Champs. Northug also had a strong race for him this season, despite being outclassed by Rickardsson.
Now let’s look at the top four women: Read more
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