From the FasterSkier archive — posts syndicated from athletes’ and coaches’ own blogs between 2004 and 2012, kept online as published. Current coverage is at fasterskier.com.

Swedish Women By Individual

Written by

Joran

World Cup, XCFeeds

Following up from last time, we’ll look a little more closely at the individual trends among some of the top Swedish women in distance and sprint events.

First the distance skiers (click through for a larger version):

Not surprisingly, Charlotte Kalla is generally the top performer here. But notice that there’s a bit of a solid drop off after her and Anna Haag. Maria Rydqvist surprised many by coming back from a year off with some very solid results, but then seemed to hit a bit of a plateau last season. Sofia Bleckur took a large jump last season, but the move from 0.5-1 standardized percent behind the median skier to -0.5 to -1 standardized percent behind the median isn’t quite as challenging. The next jump will likely be orders of magnitude harder.

I believe I’ve commented on this before, but Anna Haag’s trend over the past three seasons is a bit worrying. The Swedish women had a very strong year in 2010, but both Kalla and especially Haag seem to have experienced a bit of “regression to the mean”. That makes me wonder whether Haag’s 2010 campaign (and to a certain extent even Kalla’s) was the best we’ll see from her.

As for the sprinters (again, click for full version):

I certainly like the looks of Ingemarsdotter’s trend there: steady improvement over more than 2 seasons with little signs of a plateau. Hanna Falk appears extremely promising but I believe she had some strange medical issues last season that now I’m suddenly very fuzzy on. Something to do with her eyes, maybe? I can’t quite remember.