Statistical Skier

A far less cheery topic than skier improvement is, well, the opposite.  Lacking a better term, I’m sticking with “unimproved”.  That’s not technically accurate, since I’m actually looking at skiers who went considerably slower year to year.  But I feel bad enough pointing out trends like these, no need to add gratuitously insulting terminology to injury.

You know the drill by now: these skiers had the biggest drop off in FIS points in their five best races between the ’08-’09 and ’09-’10 seasons.  Here’s the table:

[table id=10] Continue reading ›

Last week I posted a short item looking at how Bjoern Daehlie and Vladimir Smirnov fared against each other, head to head.  Here’s a little reminder of the sort of fun this entails:

I don’t know about you, but I thought that was pretty fun, so I figured I’d do some more.

But who?  That’s where you come in!  There’s a poll up in the right sidebar.  Vote for the pair you want to see face off in a statistical grudge match.  The poll will remain open for a week…

A lot of the stuff I’ve done so far on this site looks at data over fairly long periods of time.  Let’s switch things up and look only at the previous two World Cup seasons.  Awards for most improved skiers have a special place in my heart due to my own skiing career, which had some major swings in it as well.  In this post I’m going to take a moment and point out some skiers who had dramatically better seasons in ’09-’10 than in ’08-’09.

First we’ll look just at men’s distance skiing.  There are tons of different ways you could define “most improved” depending on what interests you.  I’d like to focus on skiers who’ve done a minimum number of major (WC, WSC or OWG) distance races in each of the past two season (five, in this case).  I’m going to look at the change in the average of a skier’s best five distance races (measured by FIS points) from the ’08-’09 season to the ’09-’10. Continue reading ›