More bad news for Italy. First Arianna Follis, now Marianna Longa is calling it quits as well. Her career has followed an interesting path, as you can tell from just glancing at her distance results: Prior to 2005, Longa was a solid WC skier, but her best result was a 7th along with a handful […]
Tagged career retrospective, italy, marianna longa, skier retirement, womenFirst Arianna Follis retires, and now we learn that Marianna Longa is heading out the door (again!). This strikes me as quite a blow to the Italian women’s team. Before I wrote this post, if you asked me to list some other top Italian women besides Follis and Longa off the top of my head, […]
Tagged development, italy, retirement, womenWhat can you say about Petra Majdic? The Slovenian was delightfully hard to miss on the ski trails. Known as a classic sprint specialist, she was no slouch at distance events either: From 2002 forward, that is some very consistent skiing, year in, year out. I realize that standardized percent behind the median skier may […]
Tagged career retrospective, petra majdic, retirement, Sprint, women, World CupA commenter asked if there was a connection between my lists of improved and un-improved skiers and age. Easy enough to check, so let’s go to the tape. Here are the distance skiers: The y-axis (Improvement Index) has no units, so don’t try to interpret it. It’s just the mash-up of several ways of measuring […]
Tagged Age, Distance, men, most improved, most unimproved, Sprint, women, World CupThe final installment in the most improved/un-improved series. This time it’s the sprinters who saw the biggest drop-off in performance this season over last. Again, you can consult the first in the series for a detail description of my methodology. Basically, though, the following aspects are included: A skier’s median result The average of the […]
Tagged most unimproved, Sprint, World CupContinuing on from my previous posts looking at some skiers who saw a lot of improvement (or not) in distance events last season, we turn our attention to sprinting. You can refer back to those posts for a more detailed look at the methodology we’re using. Of course, with sprinting we don’t have fancy percent […]
Tagged most improved, SprintNo, not that A-Team, although that’s an amusing idea. I saw some discussion in the comments over at FasterSkier about whether Jessie Diggins ought to have been named to the US A Team rather than the B Team. Let’s be clear up front that this isn’t the sort of question you can answer by just […]
Tagged jessie diggins, junior, usst, women