Honestly, I’m reluctant to wade into this topic, but since this blog is supposed to focus on the intersection of XC skiing and data, I feel like I need to say something. The USST announced their team for World Championships in Oslo, which inevitably led to a certain amount of griping about the choices made […]
Also tagged team selection, USA, usst, WSCEarlier this week I introduced an idea I had for calculating a points-like measure for sprint racing that was applicable beyond the qualification round. Â You can go back and review the methodology here. In this post I’d like to revisit this idea and look at how these new points look when ranking athletes. Â First, I […]
Also tagged distributed sprint points, dsp, fis points, SprintI’ve fussed in the past about the weaknesses of FIS points in distance events, but they really are quite useful. Â Sprint events, however, just don’t have an equivalently simple and useful numerical summary. Â I’ve resorted to using the final finishing rank (i.e. what place you came in, after the elimination rounds), but I’ve never been […]
Also tagged Analysis, Sprint, technicalLast week I ranted a bit about the inadequacies of F-factors[1. The scaling factor FIS uses to adjust FIS points depending on whether the race was an interval or mass start.]. Â We looked at the results from interval vs. mass start races and determined that they do indeed produce different distributions of percent back’s (PB’s). […]
Also tagged Distance, eqpb, fis points, mass startRanking athletes based on FIS points, or some other measure, is relatively easy. Â Sometimes rankings are fun, because they give sports nuts something to argue about. Â Sometimes, however, things devolve into annoying arguments about the specific measure you’re using to rank the athletes with. Any such measure has flaws, and FIS points are no different. […]
Also tagged Distance, head to head