Category: XCFeeds

A commenter asked what would happen if we removed the bonus seconds awarded during the distance events of the Tour de Ski.  If we add the bonuses back in we get the following results:

While the actual top 12 have remained the same, the order has not.  The women see relatively few changes, but not so with the men!  The top five men end up completely re-arranged.  Of course, there’s always the caveat that the entire Tour may have played out differently without the bonuses.  Different time gaps along the way could potentially influence people’s strategies and decisions about whether to drop out and how to ski particular stages.  So in some sense, just adding the bonus seconds back in doesn’t literally tell us what would have happened.

Now let’s take a more detailed look, stage by stage.  This is an instance where looking at the time back from the median skier doesn’t make much sense, since the bonuses are happening at the front.  So it probably makes more sense to look at how adding the bonuses back in influences each skier’s time back from the leader:

My apologies for not sorting the panels in a more sensible manner.  On the one hand, without the bonuses we end up with a rather thrilling spectacle of Bauer, Perl and Clara (and to a lesser extent Northug) chasing down Cologna over the final few stages.  But of course, without the bonuses, Cologna (and everyone else) would likely have skied differently, so we can’t really say that Curdin Perl “would have won” without the time bonuses.  Still, it’s an interesting thing to think about.

Despite there being fewer changes on the women’s side, you still end up with a pretty exciting “alternate ending”, with Majdic and Kowalczyk trading the lead mid-Tour and then Johaug rushing forward on the last day to claim the overall title.  Many of the other top twelve women won very few time bonuses (or none at all) so their lines are virtually unchanged.  But the same caveat applies here: if the top twelve women were really all within 20 seconds going into the final two stages, those races would have played out far differently than they actually did.

With the women, we see first that without the distance event time bonuses Justyna Kowalczyk would actually have surrendered the overall lead very briefly after Stage 5 to Petra Majdic.  That would have created some excitement, at least.  Here’s a closer look at how the Tour “might” have played out between some key players.  I’ve used seconds behind the median skier again simply because it creates more separation between the lines making them easier to distinguish:

Most of the excitement on the men’s side would be due to the fact that Cologna had an enormous lead coming into the final stage.  If you just add those bonus seconds back in, it looks like he’ll be swallowed up by the chasers in the final climb, but in all likelihood he’d have simply skied harder that day.  But I suppose you never know…

The women would have seen a ton more lead changes a lot earlier, with Majdic, Follis and Longa all slipping past Kowalczyk for two stages before she came storming back in Stage 7.  (Hypothetically speaking, of course.)  And of course without the aid of the bonus seconds, Therese Johaug “would have” won the whole event on the final day.

All in all, that’s a pretty fun counter-factual.

Related posts:

1. <2011 Tour de Ski Preview
2. <Tour de Ski Freestyle Sprint Recap
3. <Tour de Ski Recap: Part 1

a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TSz3wasfMZI/AAAAAAAAF_c/UTcB4E_MlyA/s1600/IMG_0775.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;” src=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TSz3wasfMZI/AAAAAAAAF_c/UTcB4E_MlyA/s400/IMG_0775.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561092051067416978″ //aAfter racing around a 2.5 km loop all last week at Rumford, it was nice to return home and take a 2 hr cruise on the Danby/Mt Tabor road this morning. With a foot of snow expected tomorrow followed by a week of cold temperatures, maybe winter has finally come to the East.br /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TSz3b835DsI/AAAAAAAAF_U/wWB2xrZwTH8/s1600/IMG_0785.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 396px;” src=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TSz3b835DsI/AAAAAAAAF_U/wWB2xrZwTH8/s400/IMG_0785.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561091699464801986″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TSz3OzaVWHI/AAAAAAAAF_M/edsB5CsTnUI/s1600/IMG_0790.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;” src=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TSz3OzaVWHI/AAAAAAAAF_M/edsB5CsTnUI/s400/IMG_0790.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561091473586608242″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TSz247u9fmI/AAAAAAAAF_E/BdX9Vx-q76g/s1600/IMG_0791.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;” src=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TSz247u9fmI/AAAAAAAAF_E/BdX9Vx-q76g/s400/IMG_0791.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561091097863487074″ //adiv class=”blogger-post-footer”img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4680416899705879324-2765802672904735162?l=smsxc.blogspot.com’ alt=” //div

These are mostly just for fun, although I suppose some lessons might be drawn from them as well.  First up is a graph showing how the field was reduced stage by stage in both 2010 and 2011:

Overall there were fewer racers this year even from the start, which is interesting.  In both cases there is a major event later in the season (Olympics last year, World Championships this year) which might cause some skiers to skip the Tour.  I would have thought more people would skip the Tour last season, since the Olympics are arguably a bigger event and occur closer to the Tour.

Generally, both the men and women appear to have lost skiers at roughly the same rate between the two years.  I wonder if we’ll see the second sprint moved even later in the Tour in the future as an attempt to keep more skiers around.

Next we have some simple bar charts showing the breakdown of bonus seconds won by each skier in just this year’s Tour:

Related posts:

1. <2011 Tour de Ski Preview
2. <Tour de Ski Rest Day Recap
3. <Tour de Ski: Comparison To 2010

Continuing on from my previous post, let’s move on to look at how different nations fared compared to last year’s Tour (click through for full versions):

The German men struggled, but mainly that shows up here as skiers dropping out rather than performing poorly.  In fact, the one German man who made it all the way through the Tour performed about as well as the team did last year.  The Swiss men are obviously somewhat improved, with Cologna winning and Curdin Perl skiing about as well as Cologna did last year.

The Russian men actually did about the same.  They had lots of sprinters abandon the Tour, as they did last year, and those that finished ended up right where they were last year.  One other piece that stands out is that Kris Freeman really only had one bad stage (reportedly due to poor skis) but otherwise he was holding steady in the middle of the field.

The women saw a much improved showing by the Swedes, despite losing Anna Haag after Stage 7.  The German women, like the men, were decimated early on, with many skiers dropping out.  Interestingly, this doesn’t seem radically different than what happened last year, either.  The big losers here are clearly the Russian women, who by any reasonable measure had a terrible Tour compared to 2010.  Lots of abandoned skiers and several of those that did finish were well off the back.

I mentioned in my earlier post this morning that if you graph some of the top individual’s performances using time behind the leader rather than time behind the median skier, some different things pop out:

First of all, last year Stage 5 was the one packed with tons of bonus seconds that saw lots of big jumps, whereas this year Stage 7 arguably played that role.  Both years, Lukas Bauer was  ~100 seconds back after four stages, but he wasn’t able to claw his way back to the front this time around.  Daniel Rickardsson saw a slightly different journey that ended in roughly the same spot, just shy of 200 seconds behind the winner.  Last year he jumped ahead in Stage 5 only to give back a ton of time in the final two stages.  This year, Rickardsson still lost time, but only gradually.

With the women, you can first see that Kowalczyk actually traded the lead on a few occasions last year, but not this time.  The Italians, Follis and Longa both had very strong days on Stage 6, the 15km freestyle pursuit, but then yielded all that time and then some.  Marthe Kristoffersen really paid the price for a tough day on Stage 7, as did Astrid Jacobsen (and several others).  For instance, Petra Majdic simply fell apart relative to the leaders over the final two stages.

Related posts:

1. <2011 Tour de Ski Preview
2. <Tour de Ski Rest Day Recap
3. <Tour de Ski Freestyle Sprint Recap