Alexandra Cobb will be joining us as a winter term 8th grader. She lives in Peru, Vt and is an avid lax and soccer player. She has two older brothers who attended SMS and she saw how much easier it was to deal with them after they had been at Stratton for a couple of years. As she says; “If that place can square away Stirling and Austin, it is worth looking into.”
We look forward to having Alex join us next year!
The Tour de Carnage France is well underway. I planned to post a few graphs on Monday, the Tour’s first rest day, but a skiing post took precedence. So these graphs run through yesterday’s Stage 10.
As usual with these cycling posts I’m not going to say much. I’m just putting the graphs out there since I find them interesting and hope that others might too. Here’s the standard graph for this year’s Tour:
![](http://www.statisticalskier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/2011_tdf_stage10.png" "2011_tdf_stage10")
Each line corresponds to a single rider and all times are relative to the median rider (after that stage). And here’s the same thing broken down by team. It’s larger, so click through for the full version:
![](http://www.statisticalskier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/2011_tdf_stage10_teams.png" "2011_tdf_stage10_teams")
Apologies for not sorting the teams in a more appropriate manner than alphabetically.
Finally, I happened to grab some Tour data stretching back to 2005, so here’s how this year’s Tour compares to recent years, through Stage 10:
![](http://www.statisticalskier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/tour_comparison_stage10.png" "tour_comparison_stage10")
Note that 2009 starts with Stage 3. The results on CyclingNews for Stage 2 in 2009 were messed up so I had to trash them (the times at least). Why not plot Stage 1 either? Well, I could have connected the dots directly from Stage 1 to Stage 3, skipping the missing stage, but that seemed more potentially confusing.
I thought at first that something went wrong in acquiring the data for 2006, since it looks so different, but I checked and I think it’s right.
Related posts:
The Tour de Carnage France is well underway. I planned to post a few graphs on Monday, the Tour’s first rest day, but a skiing post took precedence. So these graphs run through yesterday’s Stage 10.
As usual with these cycling posts I’m not going to say much. I’m just putting the graphs out there since I find them interesting and hope that others might too. Here’s the standard graph for this year’s Tour:
Each line corresponds to a single rider and all times are relative to the median rider (after that stage). And here’s the same thing broken down by team. It’s larger, so click through for the full version:
Apologies for not sorting the teams in a more appropriate manner than alphabetically.
Finally, I happened to grab some Tour data stretching back to 2005, so here’s how this year’s Tour compares to recent years, through Stage 10:
Note that 2009 starts with Stage 3. The results on CyclingNews for Stage 2 in 2009 were messed up so I had to trash them (the times at least). Why not plot Stage 1 either? Well, I could have connected the dots directly from Stage 1 to Stage 3, skipping the missing stage, but that seemed more potentially confusing.
I thought at first that something went wrong in acquiring the data for 2006, since it looks so different, but I checked and I think it’s right.
Related posts:
Here are a bunch of pictures from our morning workout. As always….read the title.
Guess who?
Quick feet.
Murph, Fritz and Austin try the 1-leg jump course.
The “course” included big jumps, small jumps and changes in direction…all good for leg strength, balance and body awareness.
Hip-hop.
Hip Mobility.
Tyler heads up for his first interval. Everyone did 4-6x5minutes.
Mae.
2xAustin…and the girls.
Skyler.
Pippin.
Andy.
Sophie.
Controlled mayhem.
Hammering the steeps.
Alex and Mackenzie.
1/2 of team RF.
Gage and Hallie.
Cambria.
Anya and Rachel.
Ellery and Tess (happy b-day).
Pretty good for a goofer 🙂
Model success….put the 11 year old with a JN Champ. 
Time to head home.
Hi All, this is Maria Stuber writing my first blog post as a Craftsbury Green Racing Project athlete. I’m up at the Outdoor Center for my third week of training with the team. Since I moved out East in January, I have been doing a lot of training on my own and it feels really good to be back in a group.
GRP Newbs, Clare and Maria, climbing Mt. Mansfield on Sunday's OD run
Bryan Cook and I are living and working in the Bennington, VT area and coming up to live and train at Craftsbury as much as possible. It is the first time either of us has lived outside of the Midwest. We certainly miss the homeland, but have had an easy transition since the discovery of Kevin’s Sports Pub and Restaurant, a Packer Bar in North Bennington.
I have a full time job at Southern Vermont College as the Cross Country Coach. Bryan is working at a really nice restaurant called Pangaea Lounge. We live directly across the street from Prospect Mountain and we can ski and run on trails from our front door. Although I will always be a Midwesterner at heart, I’m slowly learning to love the Green Mountains and I think I might stay for awhile. Life is good.
There is always a lot going on at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center. I’m really looking forward to being able to coach at some of the summer camps here. The staff is phenomenal. Lynn Jennings is the running camp director and she is letting me help with the running camps throughout the summer. There is a Bill Koch League Ski Camp going on all this week that the GRP athletes are putting on, and I’ll be coaching at our new Women’s Fitness Weekend starting Friday.
Thanks for all of my pals at CXC for the outstanding support I have received the past few years. I will miss you lots. Thank you also to Judy Geer, Dick Dreissigacker, Pepa, and everyone at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center for the opportunity to continue ski racing in the East and for hosting the GRP.
![](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PDxIfRMJbAE/Thrz82amAlI/AAAAAAAAA4g/sa4yf9J-qUI/s1600/photo+4.JPG")
![](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2DLIcpgG2Sk/Thrz8QTuewI/AAAAAAAAA4Y/etyQwey6eeI/s1600/photo+3.JPG")
![](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-URHNjXwdS2Q/Thrz7ip64LI/AAAAAAAAA4Q/Rjl14cUi-bw/s1600/photo+2.JPG")
A very brief note appeared on FasterSkier the other day noting that Canadian Dasha Gaiazova has apparently been removed from the World Cup team. No one would comment because apparently an appeal is underway, so I don’t imagine we’ll hear much about it until that process has played itself out.
My impression has been that Canada has a considerably more involved set of criteria for their team selection, with very specific levels that athletes need to reach. At least, compared to the US, where objective criteria are certainly used, but “coach’s discretion” comes into play quite regularly.
I’m not going to try to parse all the various selection rules they use and try to match them up with her results last season. That seems like something better suited to the crack reporters over at FasterSkier. But let’s just take a look at her results and see if any obvious problems stick out.
![](http://www.statisticalskier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/gaiazova_offTeam1.png" "gaiazova_offTeam1")
These are just her WC, OWG and WSC results, using the simple measure of finishing place, so that we can look at distance and sprint results at the same time. The trend of her distance results isn’t terribly inspiring, but I’ve never thought that she was expected to produce results in those events anyhow.
Her sprint results have certainly been decent the last two seasons. She had an 8th and 14th last season and two 12th’s the year before that and then a handful of times she’s qualified but not made it past the quarterfinals. Is that good enough to meet Canada’s objective criteria? I honestly don’t know…
What if we compare Gaiazova to other Canadian women? How does she fare against them in distance events, which are not her specialty?
![](http://www.statisticalskier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/gaiazova_offTeam2.png" "gaiazova_offTeam2")
This graph is comparing Gaiazova with a (certainly not exhaustive) selection of other Canadian women. Each dot represents an instance of Gaiazova racing directly against that skier. Values above zero mean Gaiazova beat that skier in that race.
So she does fairly well against other top Canadian women, even in distance events. How about in sprinting?
![](http://www.statisticalskier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/gaiazova_offTeam31.png" "gaiazova_offTeam3")
She had a moderate, but not overwhelming edge versus Chandra Crawford last season, but at least recently she hasn’t had much difficulty against any of these women in sprint races.
I want to be clear that I don’t know the specifics of Canada’s selection criteria, or even if the objective criteria was the issue in this case. But it’s possible that what we’re seeing here is an example of one of the drawbacks of having very strict selection criteria based largely on objective performance measures. Namely, that you might end up not selecting your best skier!
No system for selecting athletes to national teams will be perfect, of course. Mostly I hope that the appeals process can work itself out in an amicable fashion; that’s why the appeals process is there, after all.
Related posts:
While the majority of our group did a skate distance workout on Saturday, 9 of us biked in “The Prouty”, a 100 mile bike ride that raises $ for cancer research.
The Prouty is a very well run event with clearly marked roads and SAG stops every ten miles. We were in a group of 25 that took off at 8 am on a perfect day for biking. Our plan was to ride as a group and to stop evry 20 miles for refreshment. Everything was going really well until two bikers locked handle bars at 87 miles. My sister went down hard and broke her pelvis and I launched face first into the gravel trying to avoid her. Luckily we were the only two to go down and we were well taken care of. The rest of the group finished the ride and came by the hospital to pick us up.
Moral of the story… ALWAYS WEAR HELMETS! It would have been really ugly if we did not have helmets on.
Along those lines, we see more and more people wearing bright yellow shirts when they are biking and roller skiing. This is a no brainer, wearing yellow shirts increases ones visibilty a ton. DO IT.
The death this week of Mika Myllylä has got me thinking about the Finnish men of that era generally, which led to this graph:
![](http://www.statisticalskier.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/finn_men_dope.png" "finn_men_dope")
I’ve graphed FIS points here to include results at all levels. I’d forgotten about Isometsä’s attempts at a comeback after his suspension, which as you can see didn’t go all that well. I don’t have many results for Immonen for much of the 90′s. I don’t know if that’s because he didn’t really get good until the mid-90′s, or if perhaps I’m just missing a bunch of the FIS races he happened to do. Either way, he must have been racing in Finland, since he was over 30 by the time of the 2001 WSCs.
With the benefit of hindsight, it’s tempting to look at the dramatic jumps in performance, particularly in Isometsä, Kirvesniemi and Repo between 1999-2001 and say it should have been obvious, but these things are tough to suss out from just performance trends. Still, that was some resurgence by Kirvesniemi, no?
Related posts: