Week In Review: Friday Mar 4th

Cross country World Championships are almost done and biathlon World Championships are just starting. No rest for the weary! Thanks again to Skaði Nordic for sponsoring this edition of week in review.

• We’ve had plenty of good racing including the men’s and women’s pursuits, and the men’s and women’s classic individual race.
• I reviewed some of the top performances in the pursuits, along with those of the North Americans.
• The same treatment was given to the classic races.
• We looked at the interesting question of whether Lukas Bauer tends to race faster in the first event of a major championships.
• I listed some of the most extreme performances I have in my database, in light of Matti Heikkinen’s impressive performance in the men’s classic race.

Posting might be a little irregular over the next week, but I’ll try to keep up.

Week In Review: Friday Feb 25th

With World Championships finally underway in Oslo, things are getting busy again. Here’s what’s been cooking this past week:

• We had the final World Cup races before WSCs in Drammen; so we had race snapshots for the distance and sprint races, and then the requisite recaps as well.
• I pulled together a few quick graphs summarizing various nation’s performances at World Champs over the years, as a bit of a preview.
• It may sound silly, but people with a double-L in their name do tend to perform better in WC sprint racing (although the difference is far, far from being statistically significant).
• Then we had WSCs kicking off with the freestyle sprint, and the accompanying recaps, and also some context based on previous performances.

Week In Review: Friday Feb 18th

Thanks once again to Skaði Nordic for bringing you this week’s Week In Review:

• We started off with the last of the IBU World Cup races in Maine, including the pursuits and mass starts.
• I’m debuted some new-fangled biathlon results plots for race snapshots and for looking at individual skiers. The individual plots are something I’m continuing to work on (along with some XC versions) so expect to see more of those in the future.
• I spent some time recapping the North American’s performances at the FIS races in Beitostölen, Norway.
• After taking a bit of a long break, Nicole Fessel popped up at some OPA Cup races and did quite well, so we did a short look at her races.
• I added a bit to this discussion revolving around the differences between men’s and women’s race lengths in cross country events.
• Finally, I provided a brief look at the progression of FIS penalties in North American distance races over the past decade or so.

Thank God World Cup racing starts up again this weekend. It seems like it’s been forever…

Week In Review: Friday Feb 11th

Another down week with World Cup action on the cross-country side of things, but Drammen and World Champs are just around the corner.

• Last weekend saw the return of the Rybinsk World Cups, a pursuit and a sprint. We also had the first weekend of biathlon World Cups over here in the US with some pursuits and sprints; and then more sprints this week.
• I editorialized somewhat on the recurring complaints about the strengths and weaknesses of athlete ranking lists.
• We assessed just how well (or poorly) the Rybinsk races were, along with recapping some of the specific performances.
• I also checked in on some of the US results from the Scandinavian Cup races over the past few weekends.
• I weighed in, lightly, on the somewhat odd debate that flared up at FasterSkier over whether men and women should race the same distances.
• I decided that some graphs I made for looking at the performance of the Norwegian men’s distance team were interesting enough to apply to several other nations as well.
• Finally, I lamented the fact that cross country’s sprint racing format involves five quarterfinal heats. I feel dirty just writing that.

Week In Review: Friday Feb 4th

I’m heading off to ‘The Islands” for a race tomorrow, but I should still be able to get the race snapshot graphs up, albeit a bit later in the day than usual. Thanks again to Skaði Nordic for bringing you this week’s Week In Review…

• I mucked around with Google’s Chart API just for fun with some animated graphs showing World Cup point progress and World Junior performance by  nation. (Requires Flash; recommended that you un-check the Trails option before playing with them.)
• I took a couple of posts to try to put some notable performances from the U23 pursuit in perspective.
• I revisited an old piece I wrote for FasterSkier that looks at the future performance of World Junior skiers.
• I did a series of posts showing this year’s U23/WJC performance for several nations, compared to the last 5-6 years.
• With the World Cup returning this weekend in Rybinsk I posted some data looking at just how sparse the attendance is at the Rybinsk WCs.
• Finally, since WC action has indeed returned, we saw several race snapshot posts.

Have a great weekend!

Week In Review: Friday Jan 28th

My eyes are a bit bleary from grading all day, otherwise I’d try to watch some of the WJC/U23 racing action that appears to be available online. As it is, here’s what’s been cooking here over the last week:

• Wrapping up a weekend of racing on both WC circuits before they take this one off: men’s and women’s classic distance races in Otepää, the classic sprints the next day, and the men’s and women’s biathlon mass start races.
• With Marit Björgen continuing her winning ways, I took a look at how to more fairly compare her record with that of Bente Skari and Elena Välbe.
• Another recap of the WC sprint heats and some other various odds and ends that occurred to me.
• In honor of the racing action being focused in the nation of Estonia, I devoted a post to the question of whether Andrus Veerpalu really does race unusually well at big events like the Olympics and World Championships.
• A brief summary of the results for two American biathletes who’ve been skiing well lately.
• I showed a little graphical evidence of something that I’ve mentioned a few times: that the men’s heats in WC sprint races are more likely to become slower as the day goes on than the women’s heats.
• Finally, an attempt to put the races of several of the U23 racers efforts in some more helpful context.

Week In Review: Friday Jan 21st

After solving the ski boot degradation problem, Skaði Nordic has turned to ski ties. Check them out here!

Plenty of stuff happening this week, despite the inevitable lull following the Tour de Ski:

• Some World Cup racing for both the biathlon (women’s sprint 1/15, men’s and women’s pursuit 1/16, men’s sprint 1/20, women’s sprint 1/21) and XC fields (Liberec sprint).
• Some American gal won that freestyle sprint in Liberec, race recap is here.
• Following through (eventually) on a reader request, we looked at the technique preferences for Norwegian skiers.
• Thanks to a helpful suggestion I was able to improve on my analysis of the alleged pattern of Andrew Newell qualifying well and then underperforming in the heats.
• World Juniors and U23s kick off next week in Estonia, so we had previews focusing on the historical performance of the US and Canadian teams, as well as some of the more accomplished European nations.

There was plenty to be excited about this past week for an American ski fan, what with Kikkan Randall’s performance in Liberec, and strong racing from biathletes Lowell Bailey and Laura Spector. What will the rest of the winter bring?