Skip to content

Handicapping WSC 10/15km Freestyle

I haven’t had as much time to pour into longer projects for posts this winter, so I really just slapped this together very quickly. I won’t get into too many of the technical details, but basically this is the result of a simple model that looks at people’s results given the length, technique and type (interval, mass start, etc.) and then makes a performance prediction for each skier if they were to do a 10/15km freestyle interval start race.

In order to keep the model well behaved, I had to make some executive decisions, mostly about who to include in the first place. I went the easy route and simple grabbed people who have actually done one of these events at the WC levels in the past few seasons and who has also raced this year. So there are surely some folks here who might not be selected for their nation’s WSC team, and some others are missing entirely who might very well show up at WSC. Consider this a rough starting point.

The other major piece is that races in the model are weighted such that more recent ones have more impact. Roughly speaking, races from this season count the most, and those from 2 seasons ago count the least, which was as far back as I drew data.

The result is a list of the “top 30” men and women for this event:

[table id=83 /]

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *