Statistical Skier

Giro d’Italia: After Stage 18

Joran — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:00:02 +0000

Here’s the state of things, team-by-team after yesterday’s Stage 18:

One thing to note (that you can’t quite see in this graph) is that this year’s course has caused slightly more of a spread in the field than the previous two.

Giro d’Italia: After Stage 16

Joran — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:00:35 +0000

Another overall comparison of the GC standings to the previous two years:

Giro d’Italia: After Stage 15

Joran — Mon, 21 May 2012 13:00:43 +0000

Back to the team by team view, after Stage 15 (yesterday):

Compare Movistar with Orica GreenEdge. Also, note the damage that yesterday’s stage did to several team’s top riders, e.g. Rabobank, Omega Pharma, BMC, RadioShack.

Giro d’Italia: After Stage 12

Joran — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:00:13 +0000

Another update on the overl GC standings:

Things are clearly more tightly packed at the front this year, certainly compared to 2010. That said, the folks at the back are losing time at a faster rate than last year, it seems.

Giro d’Italia: After Stage 10

Joran — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:00:40 +0000

A slightly different look at things this time, broken down by team, through Stage 10 (yesterday). This one’s a little big, so you can click on it for the full version.

Giro d’Italia – After Stage 8

Joran — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:27 +0000

I’ve been a little distracted lately, so I haven’t been as organized with the cycling data. Also, when you only do something once a year (or so) it’s pretty shocking how much better at coding you get in a year. My cycling code was a God-Awful mess, which is being slowly improved.

As usual, these cycling posts are light on analysis; mainly just an opportunity for me to have fun making pretty graphs. So here’s the state of affairs after Stage 8 (yesterday) compared to the previous two Giros:

The description for each stage is not my judgement, it’s simply taken from the Wikipedia page for each Giro.

The previous two Giros saw some splits in the field somewhat earlier, by stage 2-3 in 2010 and stage 5 in 2011, before starting to shell people for real when it hits the actual mountainous terrain.

Career Retrospective: Silvana Bucher

Joran — Fri, 11 May 2012 13:00:31 +0000

Another retiring skier that I’m only passingly familiar with, Switzerland’s Silvana Bucher. Like Vina the other day, she hasn’t raced a ton at the WC level in distance events:

Or sprints:

But you can see that one sprint race that stands out among the rest. Indeed, that 6th place finish was her best WC result, and her only top 10. She had a total of 15 races where she landed in the top 30, across both disciplines. She was most definitely a freestyle specialist, having competed in only 3 WC classic events and another 2 mixed technique events (i.e. pursuits). All the rest were skating.

Given her limited exposure to the WC scene, lets look at all of her results using FIS points:

Steadily between 75-125 FIS points for several seasons in distance races, possibly even sliding backwards a little, and then there was a rather major jump in 2007. Then there’s the near total absence in 2009, which I’d have to guess is an injury (or sometimes with women it’s a baby).

Her World Junior results were ok, but not great: 19th, 33rd, 46th, 51st. Interestingly, though, she scored a 1st and 5th at U23s in 2007.

Career Retrospective: Emilie Vina

Joran — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:00:15 +0000

A few other athletes that I was less familiar with are also retiring, according to FIS, beginning with France’s Emilie Vina. Naturally, I head over to Wikipedia and discover that apparently she’s a non-commissioned officer? Huh. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she were a biathlete, I suppose, but that’s not a combination you see much in cross country.

Compared to many of the retiring skiers I profile here, her distance WC racing was relatively limited:

And not her most successful event. She did do a lot more sprinting, though:

She apparently focused mostly on freestyle (34 freestyle sprints vs 9 classic) but wasn’t so choosy with the distance events (18 freestyle, 11 classic and 5 pursuits). Since she doesn’t have quite as many WC starts as some other folks, we could simply look at all of her FIS point results:

A partial season in 2009, injury or illness perhaps? Of interest to some may be her WJC results, which topped out at 6th, 7th and 13th in 2002. Ironically, the two better results were in the distance events.

Holly Brooks deserves a spot on the A team

Joran — Mon, 07 May 2012 13:00:27 +0000

No, not that A-Team. (Although she’d probably kick some butt.)

As discussed recently over at FasterSkier, Brooks just missed qualifying via objective criteria, as she finished 55th in the World Cup overall. That means that if she’s named, it will have to be based upon some discretionary judgement by the coaches. I think you can make a pretty good case that Brooks deserves a spot.

First let’s review her distance results, compared to a few of her peers:

This doesn’t make her look very good, although she still comes out looking pretty favorably compared to Sargent and even Stephen, to a certain degree. But as we all know, Brooks broke her wrist over Christmas, and then proceeded to race through the injury for several weeks. What does her season look like if we drop her post-injury results?

That looks to me like an athlete performing roughly on par with Jessie Diggins (who qualified for the A team via objective criteria), better than Sargent, and showing stronger improvements year-to-year than Stephen (who, I might add, is considerably younger than Brooks). I omitted Sadie Bjornsen from these plots for space reasons, but that comparison is basically the same as between Brooks and Sargent.

The argument is mostly confined to distance events:

If you omit Brooks’ post injury sprints she’s left with only a 23rd and a 46th, which is sort of a wash, in my opinion. Particularly compared to these other women, I don’t think you’d be adding Brooks for her sprinting. Any success in these events would be a bonus.

A possible counterargument would be that given the financial limitations of the US team and their reluctance to invest in older athletes, it would make more sense to simply count on naming her as a discretionary pick to the World Championships team, rather than naming her to the A team for the whole season. Honestly, I’d be willing to bet that this is actually what will happen. (Not that they’d name her to the WSC team in advance, but that they’d basically be planning on it, even if they don’t announce it publicly.)

But consider that her pre-injury distance results this season were 13th, 17th, 19th, 22nd and 36th. Even if she had spent much of the remainder of the season in the 20s rather than the teens, so at the low end of what she was doing pre-injury, she’d have been a shoe-in for making the A team on objective criteria alone. Also, it may be worth considering how much better prepared she might be for WSCs racing in Europe rather than domestically. And really, barring some catastrophic collapse there’s just no way I can see her not going to WSCs next year. I mean, raise your hand if you want to see what a relay team of Randall, Brooks, Diggins and Stephen could do? A long shot, perhaps, but with Brooks there you really do have a shot at a significant result in the relay. And if you have all four of them on the WC circuit more or less full time, they’d get two solid dry runs at the relay before WSCs.

So if it were me, I’d name her because:

Her results suggest that an injury free season could have shown her to be equal to, or better than, both Diggins and Stephen.
I want her at WSCs, particularly to complete our relay team.
I want her to be prepared for WSCs, and I’m skeptical that racing domestically and then jetting over to Europe just for WSCs is optimal.

Obviously, this is just me. And I don’t have to deal with any of the financial realities of the situation, so that makes this a much easier call for me to make. But I think that in this case Brooks’ potential for consistent top 30 results (even if its only for 1-2 seasons, given her age) is worth making an exception to the US team’s general policy of favoring younger, developing athletes.

Career Retrospective: Ivan Batory

Joran — Fri, 04 May 2012 13:00:37 +0000

Woo hoo! Another classic specialist! Ivan Batory has been around the block a few times. The first WC race I have for him is all the way back in the 1994 season. Let’s see, I think I was a freshmen in high school that year.

Among Batory’s top 30 results, 63 were classic, 31 freestyle and 20 in mixed technique events (i.e. pursuits). While his best results were undeniably weighted towards classic races, his median results actually weren’t that lopsided:

At least, they weren’t too lopsided during his heyday. As he got older, Batory did seem to let his skating slip a bit. He dabbled in sprinting, during the early days of the event:

But as you can see pretty quickly was displaced by the “true” sprinters and never had much luck with it after that. If we take a somewhat cruder look has his (World Cup-level) distance results using finishing place:

We can see that Batory’s “golden era” spanned roughly from 1999-2003. The 2003-2004 season was a big drop-off for him, and top results got thinner each year after that.

With some of these older skiers with very long careers, I think it’s fun to remind people when they retire how they did at World Juniors. In his first trip, Batory finished 21st and 22nd. The next year he finished 14th and 2nd. Both years his better race at World Juniors was the classic event.

While he had many, many top-30 results over his long career, Batory finished with only 3 podium results, but 26 top 10 results. My point here is, of course, that his success at World Juniors probably correlates well with his large number of top 10 or top 30 results. But the next step to finishing in the top three repeatedly is probably a big jump from 10th place, and not easily distinguished using 4 races when he was 19.