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Gadflies & Punching Bags

Since it’s Friday, here’s something kind of silly…

Last week, I introduced the concept of victims and nemeses, for distance races.  A nemesis is a skier who has beaten you on multiple occasions by a small margin (fewer than ten seconds).  Victims are just the reverse: people you have beaten on multiple occasions by fewer than ten seconds.  A narrow victory (or defeat) counts double in more important races: Olympics and World Championships.

The score I calculated to represent this concept indicates the degree to which someone is a nemesis or victim relative to a particular skier.  We can take this a step further and look at which skiers have the highest nemesis (or victim) scores across all athletes.  Let’s call these people Gadflies and Punching Bags.  Gadflies are skiers who are nemeses to lots of other skiers: they’ve racked up a ton of narrow victories over other athletes, particularly in big races.  Punching Bags are the reverse: they’ve accumulated a ton of defeats by narrow margins to other skiers.

Remember that in calculating Gadflies and Punching Bags skiers of all levels are treated equally.  So the “winner” in each category may be a top World Cup skier, or they may be a fairly slow World Cup skiers.  It may be fun to redo this analysis, weighting by skier speed, but I’ll save that for another time.

And of course, there’s no particular reason someone can’t be both a gadfly and a punching bag.

Here are the lists of the top five Gadflies and Punching Bags for the 2009-2010 international racing season.  Only athletes with at least five starts are eligible.

Is this silly?  Maybe.  But it sure is entertaining…check below the fold for the tables. Continue reading ›

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2010 06 11 Joran Fun Stuff Comments (0) Permalink

Daehlie vs. Smirnov

Bjoern Daehlie (NOR) is generally considered one of the greatest male skiers in history (or even the greatest).  He raced during much of the 90’s until his career was cut short by a rollerskiing accident in which he injured his back.  One of his biggest competitors during this time was Vladimir Smirnov (SOV, KAZ).  Which one was really faster? Continue reading ›

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2010 06 10 Joran Head-To-Head Comments (4) Permalink

Introducing: Biathlete Rankings

Since the athlete rankings I calculated for cross country skiers seem to be fairly popular, I thought I’d push up the schedule on releasing the biathlon versions.

The general methodology is the same as what I outlined here.  Biathlon doesn’t have sprint races, so there’s just one category of rankings, instead of splitting things up into sprint and distance.  (Actually, they have an event called a “sprint”, but it’s not at all like cross-country sprinting.  It’s really just a short distance race.)

Biathlon doesn’t utilize any complicated point system like FIS points (at least, not to my knowledge).  In fact, biathlon doesn’t even come under the organization of FIS; they have their own international organizing body, IBU.  In any case, that means these rankings are all based upon pure percent back.  Only “major” races are included (World Cup, World Championships and Olympics).  I’m less familiar with the biathlon racing circuit, so I’m not sure just how “elite” some other races like European Championships are.  Feel free to educate me if you know a lot about biathlon and think some races other than WCs, OWGs and WBCs should be included.

As with the XC rankings, I’ve attempted to use a slightly cleaner looking graph for them, with the North American skiers indicating with different colors.

I can’t leave this topic without emphasizing again that the point of these rankings is not the order of the athletes.  My motivation here was to include some measure of variability along with the rankings.  Otherwise, it’s impossible to tell which differences in any ranking system are “real” and which are more likely just due to chance.

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2010 06 09 Joran Athlete Ranking
Biathlon Comments (1) Permalink

How Well Prepared Are World Cup Rookies? (Part 2b: Sprint)

This is the final post in a four part series on rookie performance on the World Cup.  To recap: we’re trying to quantify differences in the level of preparation among athletes from different nations upon first entering the World Cup circuit.  A “rookie skier” for our purposes is one who’s done seven or fewer races in a major international competition (World Cup, World Championships or Olympics).  So far, we’ve looked distance events and sprint racing using FIS points as a measure of qualification speed.

This final installment will reexamine sprint racing, but using the final round finishing rank (1st, 2nd, etc) rather than qualification round FIS points.  It actually turns out the results are largely similar (with one big exception), so I’m going to keep the writing to a minimum and just reproduce the same set of graphs for you to chew on.

Continue reading ›

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2010 06 09 Joran Analysis
Cross Country
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Bits and Pieces…

A big hello to all the visitors I’ve had over the past week from nensa.net and fasterskier.com (and an super big thanks to those guys for linking to me!).  And an extra special hello from the individual who landed here via a Google search for “petter northug sexy”.  Can’t argue with you there, now can I?

If this is your first time checking out StatisticalSkier, be sure to peruse the Athlete Rankings, which I’ve updated again today, and are explained here.  Also you might want to check out my introductory welcome post, a little bit about me, or about the site in general.

I’ve been trying to ride a thin line so far with the statistics and graphics on the site between fun for me (i.e. complex) and fun for other people (i.e. understandable and clear).  So if you have a hard time reading a graph, or you don’t know what something means, please post a comment!  I promise I’ll respond…

Also, the comments are a great way to let me know what kinds of stuff I post that you like (or do not like).  Otherwise, I’m just guessing based on traffic, and things will skew heavily towards what I think is interesting.  Obviously, I will always reserve the right to post what I want, but I’d like to at least try to respond to reader’s interests.

Finally, a quick note on how often I’ll be posting here.  Most advice I’ve seen for blogging seems to agree that it’s key to set a schedule for posting new content and to stick with it.  My goal is to update the site with new content 2-3 times a week, most likely on a MWF sort of schedule.  I’m confident that I can keep that up at least through the fall.  Once the ski season begins, I may shift towards posting smaller items more frequently.  We’ll see how it goes, though…

2010 06 08 Joran Uncategorized Comments (2) Permalink

More Ranking Graphs…

Can I just say that if Google Analytics is hopelessly addictive for normal people, then for data-loving people like me it’s quite possibly the most addictive substance ever.  One thing I’ve learned with the small amount of traffic I’ve had so far is that people seem to like the athlete rankings.  At least, more than I was expecting.

My code for generating them was a little outdated based on what I’ve been doing lately, so I thought that based on people’s interest they deserved a make over.  I’ve altered the look to be a bit less cluttered and added a color scheme to highlight North American skiers.  Additionally, I’ve added rankings for several more years.

Again, see this post for an explanation of how I generate these rankings and error estimates.

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2010 06 07 Joran Athlete Ranking
Cross Country
World Cup Comments (1) Permalink

How Well Prepared Are World Cup Rookies? (Part 2a: Sprint)

This is another installment in a series (see here and here for important background and setup; if you get confused read them first) where I’ve been looking at comparing performances of rookie skiers on the World Cup.  In those previous two posts I looked at distance racing, so now it’s time to turn our attention to sprint racing.  That means that we’re faced with a decision to make: what measure should we use to track performance?  FIS points or rank?  Sprint FIS points only refer to an athlete’s qualification speed.  The final finishing rank (1st, 2nd, etc.) included an athlete’s performance in the elimination round, but any information about the strength of the field, or how close they were to qualifying is lost.  In past articles, I’ve avoided using FIS points for sprinting, but in this case they contain some useful information.  Rookie skiers on the World Cup are more likely to fail to qualify for the elimination rounds, meaning their qualification speed is the only real measure we have of their performance.

Continue reading ›

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2010 06 07 Joran Analysis
Cross Country
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