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{ Tag Archives } competitiveness

World Cup Field Strength Follow-Up

As promised from last time, a quick look at some similar data broken down by race length. I’ve filtered out the occasional “strange” race length, to focus on just the standard 5, 10, 15, 30 and 50 kilometer distances. The metric is the same: the median number of skiers within a fixed percent of the […]

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Are Women’s WC Fields Really ‘Weaker’?

I received an email recently asking about field strength for the men’s and women’s WC fields, particularly as it applies to mass start races. Lately we’ve seen the men’s field engage in a fair bit of pack skiing, whereas the women’s field strings out more quickly. First, I want to dispatch with a common bit […]

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Competitiveness Trends

With Marit Bjørgen (and only a handful of others) dominating the women’s WC circuit last season, I thought I’d check out how this compared to past seasons. I took all WC, OWG, WSC and TDS races for each season and counted the number of distinct skiers finishing at four different levels: 1st, top 3, top […]

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OPA Cup vs Scandinavian Cup: Quality

With more North Americans sojourning over to Europe to participate in high-level European racing that isn’t quite World Cups, I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at the OPA (or Alpen) Cup and Scandinavian Cup series in a bit more detail. As the name might imply, the Scandinavian Cup races are […]

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