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{ Category Archives } Analysis

Noah Hoffman’s Progress

Like everyone else in the world (seemingly) I enjoy Noah Hoffman’s blog. Apparently he gets a little bit of a hard time for how often he posts, but I think it’s pretty remarkable how much he shares about his training and racing. A lot of athlete blogs will, quite understandably, shy away from sharing some […]

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US Olympic Assessment

So, how did the US do overall at the Olympics this year? Well, as usual, I’m going to mostly ignore the team events. As I did before, here’s some historical context for our results this time around:   That’s all WSC and OWG results for Americans stretching back to 1992. It’s still kind of hard […]

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Effect of TdS on Olympic Results

Multiple people emailed me asking about whether there was any potential link between whether an athlete participated in the Tour de Ski and their performance at the Sochi Olympics. Personally, I like dealing with questions like this because they are a great example of how something can both be poor statistical reasoning, but still true […]

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Sochi Sprint Qualifying Times

A friend mentioned to me in passing the fairly large gaps in the qualifying times for the Sochi freestyle spring between certain skiers, so I became a little curious. The following graph shows the percent back in qualifying time for the Sochi sprint (red) for the top 30 qualifiers, along with the same data for […]

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US Championship Performance Context

On a day like today it’s probably best not to dwell on what could have been, at least for US fans. Instead, here’s some context for how we’re doing so far, compared to our results in previous Olympics and World Championships back to the early 90’s:   It may be tough to swallow today, but […]

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The Caitlin Gregg Situation

Ah, yes, another Olympic year, another wildly entertaining FasterSkier comment thread regarding team selection. I find this round interesting because I sort of assumed that most of the heat this year would fall on the men’s selections, but apparently the decision to not select Caitlin Gregg is getting the bulk of the attention. This is […]

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US Men’s Distance Olympic Selection

One of the hot topics this week in the US is who will be named to the Olympic team. There is particularly heavy speculation surrounding the men’s distance skiers, since that’s the most wide open (and the weakest). There are a lot of factors that go into a decision like this that I’m just going […]

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