North American WSC Assessment
Nothing in depth here, just a quick look at how the US and Canadian results at these past World Champs compare to past major championships (OWG and WSC). First is a look at the distance results, using standardized percent back from the median skier, and the blue line representing the median performance over time:
For the US women, their best performances weren’t much better than recently, but their median result did improve somewhat. That would point to a slightly deeper squad, if not a faster one.
Despite no big headline results from Kris Freeman, the US men still had a better showing than Vancouver, and a better team performance than the previous WSC (minus a good result from Freeman, of course).
The only modest improvement of the median result for the Canadian men is mostly the result of George Grey not skiing out of his brain like he did last year at the Olympics, and Kershaw getting sick and missing the 50k. He may not have been quite up with Harvey in that race, but I’d bet he he would have skied fairly well.
Not a terribly impressive WSCs from the Canadian women in the distance events. They’re still rebuilding and hopefully it won’t take too many more years.
The sprint version of these plots are a little silly, since there’s only one sprint race per event, so the amount of data is dramatically reduced. Still, for completeness and comparison: Read more
WSC Men’s 50km
Another day, another impressive win for Petter Northug. I didn’t get to watch this race, but so far no one has figured out a way to break the race up prior to the final few kilometers. I’m not sure the pace was exactly slow, but there was certainly a ton of skiers packed close together. All my posts this week will be on the brief side, so here’s a graph for the top men (click through for full version):
The field stayed relatively compact it seems, as the leaders just barely touched the ‘Inhuman’ range. I”m sure Alex Harvey was disappointed to not be on the podium today, but that was still an impressively good race for him, all things considered. It was interesting to see Tobias Angerer near the front as well, since his season has been a rough one. But if that’s largely been due to illness, he might be fairly strong for the final few weeks of the WC schedule.
And here’s a look at the other North Americans: Read more
WSC Women’s 30k Recap
Finally, someone manages to beat Marit Bjørgen. If I’d had to pick who was most likely to pull it off, I actually would have bet on either Justyna Kowalczyk or Therese Johaug. Kowlaczyk is probably the consensus choice, but based on some of the commentary I’ve read so far, I feel like I’m less surprised that it turned out to be Johaug than some others seem to be. Sure, she’s young, but when I look at who in the women’s field has put in some supremely impressive race efforts this season, both Kowalczyk and Johaug have maxed out at roughly the same level. It’s just that Bjørgen has practically lived at that extreme.
Anyway, here’s a look at the top women (click through for full version):
Saturday’s result is highlighted with the blue circled. I’m measuring performance using standardized percent back from the median skier, adjusted slightly for differences between mass start and interval formats.
As you can see, Johaug’s race was the best of her career by a comfortable margin, but she’s clearly approached this level of performance on a few occasions this season. Several people have asked how this ranks overall. By this measure, Johaug’s race was 2.76 standard deviations better than a ‘typical’ percent back from the median. There are only 76 race efforts in major races since 1992 that are better, including men or women.
Now, that might actually seem low to some people, which is understandable. What’s hurting her is (a) the women’s field is actually a little less prone to extreme performances and (b) it happened in a 30k. Even using percent back doesn’t completely remove differences in race length. The reason probably revolves around psychology and race tactics. In long races, once you have a large gap (1-2 minutes) there’s little incentive to try to increase that margin. Similarly, a lot of racers, once their behind by that much, will stop trying to pursue the leader and simply ‘race for second’. In shorter races, which tend to be interval starts, racers have less reliable information about their position, so even if someone is told they were up by 30 seconds in a 10k, with 1k to go, they aren’t as likely to ease up for the remainder. The result is that long races can see big gaps appear, but they aren’t quite as proportionally large as what we see in shorter races.
There are simple ways to remedy this. If we look only at women, Johaug’s race was the 19th best (i.e. most extreme) all time, and if we reduce down to only women’s 30k’s, it’s the 2nd most extreme (losing out to Julia Tchepalova, 3-20-1999). So that’s probably a somewhat better indication of how impressive that race was.
As for the Americans: Read more
Race Snapshot: WSC Men’s 50k
Nice job Alex Harvey! On some level I’m sure it’s disappointing to not be on the podium, but still, a heck of a race. Very tight race, so FIS points aren’t an ideal measure, of course.
Race Snapshot: WSC Women’s 30k
Wow, what a performance by Therese Johaug today! Of course, FIS points might be a tad misleading for many of the skiers as a result:
WSC Men’s 15km Classic: North Americans
Once again nothing spectacular from the North Americans, but nothing truly horrible either. Here are the Americans:
That’s a pretty average race for Freeman. His best efforts this season have been just above -2, which would likely have just put him in the top ten today, and I mean that literally: he would have been 10th. So if you are inclined to give much credence to these kinds of comparisons (and let’s face it, this is wild-ass speculation) even if Freeman had put in an effort as good as anything he’s done this season, it probably wouldn’t have netted him a medal. Hoffman however, had a fairly strong race for him, as did Lars Flora.
Turning to the Canadians, who were resting Harvey and Kershaw for the team sprint:
Sadly, another terrible race for George Grey, even compared to his pre-2009 self. Babikov had a decent day, especially considering that he’s typically better in skating events. And I suppose this means Len Valjas probably has won the relay team start sweepstakes? We’ll see…
WSC Men’s 15km Classic Recap
It’s days like this that I point to when people ask if I can use all my skiing data to predict race results. The simple truth is that nothing does a great job of predicting ski racing results beyond the level of common sense, because you get days like this on a fairly regular basis.
Here’s a look at the top six men (click through for full version):
Clearly these are all good skiers who are generally capable of podium level results, although the Russian, Volzhentsev, is a bit of a new comer and Manificat hasn’t had quite as good a season as last year, in addition to being more known for his skating.
Matti Heikkinen’s effort, fully three standard deviations away from the mean is quite impressive. That’s the 18th 26th most extreme result I have in my database (including men and women). As you might expect, values that extreme often involve a little extra help. Several of those top 26 are by known dopers and several more involved days with strange weather or waxing situations.1
It doesn’t take anything away from Heikkinen’s win, but waxing clearly played a major role in the results today. The Swedes, in particular, again apparently had boatloads of trouble.
Stanislav Volzhentsev hasn’t raced much this season, but every FIS race he’s done this season, to my knowledge, has been a classic race. In fact, of the 31 distance results I have on record for him, 16 are classic, 10 are freestyle and 5 are pursuits. So he does seem to be focusing on classic. But being a classic specialist doesn’t necessarily overcome poor skis (which may be what happened to Lukas Bauer, although 7th isn’t too shabby really).
Here’s a version of the same graph that indicated the technique of each race, where ‘FC’ refers to pursuits: Read more
- The remainder are from legitimately inhuman skiers: Daehlie, Skari, Smirnov, etc. ↩
Recent Comments