In the run up to the World Cup season, I had been trying to think of ways to create a single graph that would do a decent job of communicating how good each person’s race was in the context of their past results. Â I wanted something relatively simple and easy to read that would hopefully […]
Also tagged race snapshot, recapSkiTrax and FIS are holding a fantasy World Cup contest, roughly modeled after the very popular fantasy baseball or fantasy football competitions that we all know and love. Â Basically, you pick four men and four women (plus a “bonus” man and woman, from outside the top 15 rankings from last year), and then your “team” […]
Also tagged contest, fantasy skiing, fis, skitraxOne really simple question that occurred to me while playing with all this skiing data is, How many races do these athletes actually do? Now, I can’t really answer that completely, since I don’t have every single cross country ski race in existence in my database. Â But what I’m really getting at is the notion […]
Also tagged Distance, participation rates, SprintSometimes it’s a good thing to ask basic questions that everyone thinks they know the answer to. Â Sometimes you get surprising answers, sometimes not. So, how old are World Cup skiers? In general, World Cup skier ages tend to center around 25-26. Â These distributions all have a slight right skew, which just means there tend […]
Also tagged Age, trendsWhen most people say that World Cup skiers are animals, they probably mean they are fierce, strong competitors. Â I got my PhD in statistics in a department that found itself working quite often with very strong wildlife biology and ecology departments, so for me that reference leads me to think, “Well, what if they really […]
Also tagged Analysis, Distance, R, survival, technicalA far less cheery topic than skier improvement is, well, the opposite. Â Lacking a better term, I’m sticking with “unimproved”. Â That’s not technically accurate, since I’m actually looking at skiers who went considerably slower year to year. Â But I feel bad enough pointing out trends like these, no need to add gratuitously insulting terminology to […]
Also tagged Distance, men, unimprovedThis is the final post in a four part series on rookie performance on the World Cup. Â 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. Â A “rookie skier” for our purposes is one who’s done seven or fewer races […]
Also tagged Analysis, rookies, Sprint, US Skiing