First off, many thanks to Cosmo for the shout out on Twitter. Â My traffic today will be much larger than usual. Â Updated charts after today’s stage (and some new stuff too) below the fold… Continue reading ›
Tagged bump chart, tour de franceThanks to NordicXplained I’ve been alerted to several more athletes retiring after the 2009-2010 season. Â These next three may be somewhat less famous than the other skiers I profiled, but that doesn’t make them less important or less interesting! Â For instance… Continue reading ›
Tagged retirement, reto burgermeister, retrospective(Updated with results from today’s stage.) A few years ago I saw that someone had made some bump charts based on Tour de France results. Â (I actually was alerted to them via Junk Charts). Â Brilliant! Â Sadly, it hasn’t seemed to catch on, as I haven’t seen these sort of graphs floating around much since then. Â Then again, maybe they’ve been everywhere and I just missed them. Â In any case…
Statistical Skier to the rescue! Â Sure, it’s not skiing related, but let’s be honest. Â The proportion of cross country ski racers paying fairly close attention to the Tour is probably pretty high. Â Graphs below the fold… Continue reading ›
Tagged bump chart, tour de franceNow that I have some athlete similarity code up and running, let’s take it for a spin, shall we?
The basic idea is to pick a skier (Beckie Scott in this case) and then mine my results database for skiers who’ve had similar careers. Â This is a fairly complicated task with a lot of steps. Â You can refer to my previous post for more details on the methodology. Â The important things to remember at the moment, though are:
– My measure of similarity looks at every result in overlapping age ranges
– This is an inherently noisy process; we can expect some bad matches
– This is not a 100% automated process; we should expect to have to make some judgements along the way about when two skiers can reasonably be thought of as “similar”.
– Distance and sprint racing will be treated separately.
– Athletes that are “most similar” to Beckie Scott might still be very different in an absolute sense. Continue reading ›
Tagged athlete similarity, beckie scott, Distance, SprintThis idea comes from a similar sort of game that baseball stat heads play. Â The idea is to match up similar athletes based upon their performances. Â In baseball, we’d look at a whole slew of statistics for some current player’s career and then scan through the historical records and find other players who had similar careers (at least, where they overlap in terms of age).
Obviously, there’s a whole heck of a lot more information floating around about baseball players than skiers, so we shouldn’t have very high expectations. Â But as I’ll demonstrate, we can actually create something that works ok. Continue reading ›
Tagged Analysis, athlete similarity, DistanceA week on the road for me, so things have been a little slow. Â Here’s what’s been happening while I travel around to watch my friends get married…
As for me, I’m undecided as to whether I want to root for Spain or Holland this weekend. Â I’ve usually enjoyed watching Holland play, but they’ve been a bit of a disappointment this tournament. Â And I really loved how Spain played against Germany. Â I’m betting it’ll be 2-0 Spain…
Have a great weekend!
Tagged week in reviewA late addition to the skier retirement series is German Claudia Nystad (before she married she raced under the name Claudia Kuenzel; FIS hyphenates her name, so I will too).
Kuenzel-Nystad has quite a few Olympic and World Championship medals, although most of them were in relays. Â She has 8 medals (all gold and silver) in both sprint and distance relays. Â Additionally, she has a silver medal from the individual sprint in the Turin Olympics and another silver from the individual sprint in the 2003 Val di Fiemme World Championships.
I counted 26 podium results in various major events (WC, OWG and WSC). Â That includes distance and sprint and Tour de Ski races. Â Sixteen of these were in distance races and another ten were sprints. Â A few of the distance races were actually quite short, being prologue events at Tour de Ski or other stage race format events.
Tagged claudia kuenzel-nystad, retirement, retrospective