Category: XCFeeds

a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWUGqbkQpI/AAAAAAAAFZ4/LgWLi5Xef3Y/s1600/IMG_9860.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 194px;” src=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWUGqbkQpI/AAAAAAAAFZ4/LgWLi5Xef3Y/s400/IMG_9860.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545501358366671506″ //aThe skiing is great on the mountain, but it is hard to get in easy distance so today we did some sprint relays. The competition was tight and the kids got in a good tough workout!br /Enjoy the pictures.br /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWT3CrmybI/AAAAAAAAFZw/3Tjn8s6o0z0/s1600/IMG_9865.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;” src=”http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWT3CrmybI/AAAAAAAAFZw/3Tjn8s6o0z0/s400/IMG_9865.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545501089998490034″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWTlDVU5NI/AAAAAAAAFZo/TJqWWA7U6a8/s1600/IMG_9868.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;” src=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWTlDVU5NI/AAAAAAAAFZo/TJqWWA7U6a8/s400/IMG_9868.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545500780935832786″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWTS60tbaI/AAAAAAAAFZg/RHfxdvDw2hw/s1600/IMG_9869.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 350px;” src=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWTS60tbaI/AAAAAAAAFZg/RHfxdvDw2hw/s400/IMG_9869.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545500469413899682″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWTG_WFXAI/AAAAAAAAFZY/3tE1BAtG8hk/s1600/IMG_9870.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;” src=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWTG_WFXAI/AAAAAAAAFZY/3tE1BAtG8hk/s400/IMG_9870.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545500264469191682″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWS2FLp-CI/AAAAAAAAFZQ/t3kVr_wLx8I/s1600/IMG_9872.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;” src=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWS2FLp-CI/AAAAAAAAFZQ/t3kVr_wLx8I/s400/IMG_9872.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545499973978290210″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWSW-HKhNI/AAAAAAAAFZI/jJDtPrcMElA/s1600/IMG_9886.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 390px;” src=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWSW-HKhNI/AAAAAAAAFZI/jJDtPrcMElA/s400/IMG_9886.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545499439504458962″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWSIThOBqI/AAAAAAAAFZA/QYf1c8zvQ3A/s1600/IMG_9888.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/TPWSIThOBqI/AAAAAAAAFZA/QYf1c8zvQ3A/s400/IMG_9888.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545499187552847522″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWR2ZU-KoI/AAAAAAAAFY4/YP4Z3tEbmAs/s1600/IMG_9890.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/TPWR2ZU-KoI/AAAAAAAAFY4/YP4Z3tEbmAs/s400/IMG_9890.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545498879874443906″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWRh8gy4hI/AAAAAAAAFYw/7x72HsmtW2A/s1600/IMG_9895.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;” src=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWRh8gy4hI/AAAAAAAAFYw/7x72HsmtW2A/s400/IMG_9895.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545498528542024210″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWRRdWAOEI/AAAAAAAAFYo/6DoEqbW5vZQ/s1600/IMG_9899.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 180px;” src=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWRRdWAOEI/AAAAAAAAFYo/6DoEqbW5vZQ/s400/IMG_9899.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545498245297354818″ //abr /a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWRH_QtrfI/AAAAAAAAFYg/6LQdiXj-QN8/s1600/IMG_9913.JPG”img style=”display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 382px;” src=”http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TPWRH_QtrfI/AAAAAAAAFYg/6LQdiXj-QN8/s400/IMG_9913.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5545498082603281906″ //adiv class=”blogger-post-footer”img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4680416899705879324-3267000900006884427?l=smsxc.blogspot.com’ alt=” //div

My previews for the US biathlon teams will be briefer, which reflects the fact that I know less about the US biathlon team, and biathlon in general.  Feel free to correct me in the comments if I get anything horribly wrong.  For example, I’m going to take a very simplistic approach to who’s actually on the US team by just looking at the skiers I have data on.  The team selections seem pretty fluid to me through and between seasons.

Let’s start with the men.  I’m going to begin with the men who did World Cup or Olympic races last season:

First, we should note that biathlon is much more volatile that cross country skiing thanks to the shooting element.  So it’s not necessarily surprising to see people bouncing around from 15th one week to 80th the next.  (I’ve plotted rank here rather than percent back.)

I’ve plotted only results from World Cups, Olympics and World Biathlon Championships here, and obviously only four guys have enough data to merit trend lines.  Tim Burke’s dramatic improvement in recent years is evident, although it’s a bit hard to pick out his stellar season last year in these data.  Lowell Bailey had a bit of an off season last year after breaking into the top twenty on occasion in recent years.  Jay Hakkinen also had an off year, after being a very consistent presence in the top twenty for many years.  Jeremy Teela is an interesting case.  He had been steadily struggling more and more for quite a few seasons and rather dramatically turned things around last year.  We’ll revisit that in a moment.

A handful of younger skiers cut their teeth at World Cups or the Olympics as well, although none of them really showed anything at the same level as Burke, Teela, Hakkinen or Bailey.

Let’s take a look at some shooting statistics:

This graph should be fairly self explanatory.  If some dots are hard to see, or apparently missing, it’s because of overplotting.  Once again, if you’re unfamiliar with biathlon, keep in mind how crucial shooting accuracy can be, so small changes here can easily translate into minutes in a ski race.

Here we find the answer to Teela’s sudden resurgence last year.  His shooting had been steadily declining for basically eight years and then he rebounded dramatically, improving his overall shooting accuracy by more than 10 percentage points in two seasons.  Let me emphasize that that is a huge improvement; the difference between shooting 65% and nearly 80% could easily translate into averaging 2-3 fewer misses per race.  This could mean anywhere from 45 seconds to several minutes, depending on the race.

On the other hand, Hakkinen, who had an off year last year, saw his shooting slip a bit after being a very consistent shot for many seasons.

Let’s look at how these guy’s shooting stacked up compared to other WC skiers last year:

The contour plot represents male WC skiers with at least 50 shots last season; it’s better to be as far up near the right corner as possible.  Then I plotted these eight guy’s shooting stats separately.  Some of the dots are a bit hard to see, since their size if proportional to their respective sample sizes.  If you squint a bit, you’ll find them all.

Leif Nordgren and Kevin Patzold didn’t race much, but when they did they shot very well.  On the opposite side of the spectrum, Wynn Roberts and Zach Hall (an old teammate of mine) also didn’t race much but didn’t fare so well in the range.  Each of the remaining four are sort of dancing around that upper right corner where everyone wants to be.  Lowell Bailey and Jay Hakkinen were about average standing, but struggled some shooting prone.  Conversely, Tim Burke and Jeremy Teela were about average or slightly above shooting prone, but struggled somewhat standing.

There are ton of other biathletes out there trying to break into the World Cup scene, of course, and I won’t pretend to understand who’s going to get a chance to ski which major races.  My understanding is that biathlon decides these things with try-out races more than cross country does (at least, in the US).  But in any case, here’s a look at the guys who didn’t happen to ski World Cup’s last season that I still have data on:

I struggled with how exactly to plot these guy’s results.  Biathlon doesn’t have an equivalent to FIS points in cross country skiing, so although I could have used percent back, that wouldn’t take into account the strength of the field.  I settled on just using rank, and then coloring the points by the type of race, so you have to make your own judgement about which 10th place results are more meaningful than others.  Another way to say this is that the only points that are strictly comparable are those of the same color.

I’m even less comfortable making predictions about biathlon, but here it goes: Burke will have another excellent season, but not one that’s a big improvement.  He might sneak onto the podium but only if everything breaks his way.  Teela will continue to ride his shooting renaissance  to some consistently good (but not spectacular) results, putting him in the top thirty, but probably not often much higher.  I certainly hope that Hakkinen and Bailey will rebound this year, but your guess is as good as mine, really.  As for the younger guys, I’m not sure we’ve seen anyone who’s really going to be competitive with the big four of Burke, Teela, Hakkinen and Bailey.

Related posts:

1. <Athlete Profile: Tim Burke
2. <Biathlon Shooting Accuracy
3. <Biathlon and Cross Country Volatility Trends

My previews for the US biathlon teams will be briefer, which reflects the fact that I know less about the US biathlon team, and biathlon in general.  Feel free to correct me in the comments if I get anything horribly wrong.  For example, I’m going to take a very simplistic approach to who’s actually on the US team by just looking at the skiers I have data on.  The team selections seem pretty fluid to me through and between seasons.

Let’s start with the men.  I’m going to begin with the men who did World Cup or Olympic races last season:

First, we should note that biathlon is much more volatile that cross country skiing thanks to the shooting element.  So it’s not necessarily surprising to see people bouncing around from 15th one week to 80th the next.  (I’ve plotted rank here rather than percent back.)

I’ve plotted only results from World Cups, Olympics and World Biathlon Championships here, and obviously only four guys have enough data to merit trend lines.  Tim Burke’s dramatic improvement in recent years is evident, although it’s a bit hard to pick out his stellar season last year in these data.  Lowell Bailey had a bit of an off season last year after breaking into the top twenty on occasion in recent years.  Jay Hakkinen also had an off year, after being a very consistent presence in the top twenty for many years.  Jeremy Teela is an interesting case.  He had been steadily struggling more and more for quite a few seasons and rather dramatically turned things around last year.  We’ll revisit that in a moment.

A handful of younger skiers cut their teeth at World Cups or the Olympics as well, although none of them really showed anything at the same level as Burke, Teela, Hakkinen or Bailey.

Let’s take a look at some shooting statistics:

This graph should be fairly self explanatory.  If some dots are hard to see, or apparently missing, it’s because of overplotting.  Once again, if you’re unfamiliar with biathlon, keep in mind how crucial shooting accuracy can be, so small changes here can easily translate into minutes in a ski race.

Here we find the answer to Teela’s sudden resurgence last year.  His shooting had been steadily declining for basically eight years and then he rebounded dramatically, improving his overall shooting accuracy by more than 10 percentage points in two seasons.  Let me emphasize that that is a huge improvement; the difference between shooting 65% and nearly 80% could easily translate into averaging 2-3 fewer misses per race.  This could mean anywhere from 45 seconds to several minutes, depending on the race.

On the other hand, Hakkinen, who had an off year last year, saw his shooting slip a bit after being a very consistent shot for many seasons.

Let’s look at how these guy’s shooting stacked up compared to other WC skiers last year:

The contour plot represents male WC skiers with at least 50 shots last season; it’s better to be as far up near the right corner as possible.  Then I plotted these eight guy’s shooting stats separately.  Some of the dots are a bit hard to see, since their size if proportional to their respective sample sizes.  If you squint a bit, you’ll find them all.

Leif Nordgren and Kevin Patzold didn’t race much, but when they did they shot very well.  On the opposite side of the spectrum, Wynn Roberts and Zach Hall (an old teammate of mine) also didn’t race much but didn’t fare so well in the range.  Each of the remaining four are sort of dancing around that upper right corner where everyone wants to be.  Lowell Bailey and Jay Hakkinen were about average standing, but struggled some shooting prone.  Conversely, Tim Burke and Jeremy Teela were about average or slightly above shooting prone, but struggled somewhat standing.

There are ton of other biathletes out there trying to break into the World Cup scene, of course, and I won’t pretend to understand who’s going to get a chance to ski which major races.  My understanding is that biathlon decides these things with try-out races more than cross country does (at least, in the US).  But in any case, here’s a look at the guys who didn’t happen to ski World Cup’s last season that I still have data on:

I struggled with how exactly to plot these guy’s results.  Biathlon doesn’t have an equivalent to FIS points in cross country skiing, so although I could have used percent back, that wouldn’t take into account the strength of the field.  I settled on just using rank, and then coloring the points by the type of race, so you have to make your own judgement about which 10th place results are more meaningful than others.  Another way to say this is that the only points that are strictly comparable are those of the same color.

I’m even less comfortable making predictions about biathlon, but here it goes: Burke will have another excellent season, but not one that’s a big improvement.  He might sneak onto the podium but only if everything breaks his way.  Teela will continue to ride his shooting renaissance  to some consistently good (but not spectacular) results, putting him in the top thirty, but probably not often much higher.  I certainly hope that Hakkinen and Bailey will rebound this year, but your guess is as good as mine, really.  As for the younger guys, I’m not sure we’ve seen anyone who’s really going to be competitive with the big four of Burke, Teela, Hakkinen and Bailey.

Related posts:

1. <Athlete Profile: Tim Burke
2. <Biathlon Shooting Accuracy
3. <Biathlon and Cross Country Volatility Trends

divThe SMS Nordic team is always trying to decide what workouts we want to do. There are so many great ones to choose from but we can’t pick them all and come up with a program that makes sense. There are some key components to any Nordic training program, what are the most important?, which should have priority? where should the focus be? Does anyone really know? Strength is a good one to look at. During the past few seasons we have tried and seen many different strength routines that have included some weights, Olympic lifts, balance, flexibility, speed, coordination, body weight, general moves, specific moves etc. This year, like most we went back to the drawing board, collaborated ideas and information and came up with a new one. Check it out……. /divdivbr //divdivbr //divdivbr //divdivbr //divobject width=”320″ height=”266″ class=”BLOG_video_class” id=”BLOG_video-3848bbc563979e74″ classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″ codebase=”http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0″param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/get_player”param name=”bgcolor” value=”#FFFFFF”param name=”allowfullscreen” value=”true”param name=”flashvars” value=”flvurl=http%3A%2F%2Fv12.nonxt2.googlevideo.com%2Fvideoplayback%3Fid%3D3848bbc563979e74%26itag%3D5%26app%3Dblogger%26ip%3D0.0.0.0%26ipbits%3D0%26expire%3D1296557768%26sparams%3Did%252Citag%252Cip%252Cipbits%252Cexpire%26signature%3D1ECC2C1CFE853AF82E2FD7382A7345FB884E11AF.1E8B57E724430EDE526E89C4FD19B9CC9D584133%26key%3Dck1amp;iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2FThumbnailServer2%3Fapp%3Dblogger%26contentid%3D3848bbc563979e74%26offsetms%3D5000%26itag%3Dw160%26sigh%3DwEkiIQnWl6uJKifvWV9mva31E1samp;autoplay=0amp;ps=blogger”embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/get_player” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”width=”320″ height=”266″ bgcolor=”#FFFFFF”flashvars=”flvurl=http%3A%2F%2Fv12.nonxt2.googlevideo.com%2Fvideoplayback%3Fid%3D3848bbc563979e74%26itag%3D5%26app%3Dblogger%26ip%3D0.0.0.0%26ipbits%3D0%26expire%3D1296557768%26sparams%3Did%252Citag%252Cip%252Cipbits%252Cexpire%26signature%3D1ECC2C1CFE853AF82E2FD7382A7345FB884E11AF.1E8B57E724430EDE526E89C4FD19B9CC9D584133%26key%3Dck1iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fvideo.google.com%2FThumbnailServer2%3Fapp%3Dblogger%26contentid%3D3848bbc563979e74%26offsetms%3D5000%26itag%3Dw160%26sigh%3DwEkiIQnWl6uJKifvWV9mva31E1sautoplay=0ps=blogger”allowFullScreen=”true” //objectdiv class=”blogger-post-footer”img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4680416899705879324-5549902140678035673?l=smsxc.blogspot.com’ alt=” //div

Caitlin and I have been receiving a lot of emails and phone calls of congratulations.  Thank you for all the well wishes, we are very excited.  A lot of people have been asking about the ring.

Matt Firth, a local artist from the Methow Valley custom made the ring.  We are not big on material possessions but we both enjoy art and supporting local artists.

Initial Sketches

My brother touring Matt's shop and inspecting the ring. Thanks Matt for a wonderful one-of-a-kind piece of art.

Tower Peak

Oharu

Someday we would like to climb Kilamanjaro (Oharu).  Tickets to Nairobi are quite expensive so it might be a 10 or 20 year anniversary trip.  Needless to say we are looking forward to climbing many mountains together.

The Gregg Family is growing. (Tara we missed you and Simon in West)

I couldn’t be happier right now.  The racing season has begun and I have started it off with one of my best classic races of my life.  Things have only gone up from there. On Sunday I went out for a nice over distance ski and my first ski of the year on Windy Ridge.  My favorite trail in West Yellowstone.

Will you ….?

Normally Caitlin and I ‘trailhead’ together and I think she was really starting to wonder why I was skiing with her.

She said 'Yes!'

It took some coordinating, but the timining of the proposal was perfect. A few minutes after I asked, Chad and Alieta arrived, then my Mom and Dad skied up. It was wonderful to have my family so close.

Announcing the 'Big News' to my CXC family

As always, there’s lots of stuff I could focus on, but we can’t have everything.  As is usually the case, the weekend was a bit of a mixed bag for the North Americans.  Kris Freeman continued to look quite strong despite some bad luck with his poles.  Alex Harvey and Devon Kershaw had much stronger weekends this time around.  Kikkan Randall had more solid distance races, although her sprint race wasn’t stellar.  And so on.

Let’s start out with the same style graph I used in my earlier post, only this time highlighting the North Americans:

While I haven’t labeled the athletes individually, it should be pretty clear who’s who.  Harvey clearly was having a great weekend but couldn’t hold on in the skate race yesterday.  Kershaw and Freeman did well despite pretty pedestrian sprint races.  As for Randall, if she had had an ok (for her) sprint race, that could easily have bought her 20 seconds, and with a great sprint race (if we kept the distance results the same, which isn’t really realistic) she could have contested for a place in the top five.

I need to comment  a bit more on Stephen and Arritola, since I disagree somewhat with the characterization of their freestyle races in this FasterSkier recap.  As a commenter on that article correctly points out, much of the gains in overall place they made were the result of other skiers DNF/DNS-ing (at least half, or a bit more).  I’m sure this will spark some measure of debate, but I have to agree with the original commenter.

Let’s start with the graph above.  We’re plotting seconds from the median skier after each stage, so in the case of Arritola, she lost time yesterday on the median woman, not just the leaders.  Stephen held about even relative to the median woman.  If we isolate just their skate performances yesterday in terms of FIS points compared to their other WC starts we get the following:

Of course, now we’re comparing them only to the winner on Sunday’s stage (Therese Johaug).  Even then, it looks like Stephen had a decent race while Arritola had a pretty bad one.  For an even closer look at the data, we can focus in on just the head-to-head matchups for each woman versus their competitors from Sunday and look at the difference in their respective percent back.  First, Liz Stephen:

Keep in mind that unlike some of the other versions of this graph that I’ve made, this includes pursuits and mass starts, since yesterday’s race wasn’t an interval start race.  Also, I nudged the dots for yesterday’s skate race over a bit (the blue) so they are more visible.  As always, the red line indicates the median for all races in a particular season.

Once again, this looks like an ok race for Stephen, but nothing spectacular, though perhaps a modest improvement on her other races this season.  As for Arritola:

This looks less good overall (above zero is bad, below zero is good), but again, not substantially different from Arritola’s races so far this season.

As always, I don’t mean to pick on these ladies.  I just think it’s important to be clear about when people have raced well or not.

Related posts:

1. <USST Preview: Liz Stephen & Morgan Arritola
2. <Assessing The Weekend’s Racing
3. <Gällivare Recap: North Americans

This recap of this past weekend’s WC races will be a little different than before.  Rather than focus on individual performances, I’d like to look at the races as a group.  Stage race formats are relatively new to the cross country world, and these short stage races are even newer.  Since they are roughly modeled off of cycling style stage races, I thought it might be interesting to graph them accordingly.

Over the summer, I had some fun making bumps charts for the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España.  What do we get if we make the same plots for XC stage races?

Each line represents a single skier.  I calculated the cumulative times for each skier after each stage (including the time bonuses for the sprint race) and then plotted each skier’s difference from the median after the end of each stage.  In a cycling race, the median time would roughly represent the ‘peloton’.  Lines that dip downward mean that athlete gained time; lines the shoot up are athletes losing time.  Lines that end before the last stage are skiers who abandoned.

We can easily spot Marit Bjoergen dominating everyone in the women’s race.  The men’s field saw a lot more shuffling, it seems.  The peculiar effects of pursuit style starts are apparent as well.  Despite the final stage meriting it’s own WC and FIS points you can see many skiers who were well off the back at the start of the freestyle stage losing even more gobs of time.  When you’re off the back in a ‘mass start’ type race, people have a tendency to just let up a bit and stop racing, I imagine.  Some of these folks may have just had a rough day, of course.

You can also see some distinct clumping in the men’s race.  You had a fairly large train of leaders, with a few individuals separating themselves by the end of the freestyle race and then two groups further back with a handful of skiers left in “no man’s land” between the first and second groups.

For the women, the front of the field ended up fairly spread out, but towards the middle you start to see some small groups of skiers together.

One of my main interests in making these plots was to investigate the relative importance of each stage to the overall results.  I have suspected for some time that performing well in the sprint races isn’t quite as crucial as doing well in the distance races.  It’s hard to see in the version above, but let’s try highlighting the skiers who didn’t qualify for the elimination rounds in the sprint:

Quite a difference between the men and women, no?  The lesson here could either be that the women’s field just isn’t as deep as the men’s field, or that the time bonuses for the sprint race need to be different for men and women, or both.

The top thirty for the women remained largely unchanged after the sprint with only a few women sneaking up a few places.  The men saw a huge group of skiers charging up from well below 30th after the sprint to dominate the leader board.

I wonder if four stages would be a better length, adding in a second sprint race between the two distance events.  That would be a pretty brutal four days for the athletes, I imagine.  If you put a rest day in the middle the event starts getting too long for a weekend.  Additionally, I don’t think the time bonuses applied to the sprint races are lining up with how we think about sprint races.  It seems to me that your qualification time is only relevant insofar as whether it puts you in the top 30.  I think it might be interesting to scrap the qualification times for the top 30 and then reassign times to these skiers, working down from the 31st qualification time based on how they did in the heats.  So, using the same time bonuses, 30th place would receive the qualification round time of the 31st skier minus one second, and so on.  Of course, you could fiddle with the time bonus amounts to achieve whatever sort of advantage you’d like.

If I have time I might put together a short post on some individual skiers who did well or poorly in Kuusamo, but I’ve got quite a few posts on tap for this week, so we’ll have to play it by ear.  If you have any particular skiers you’d like to see graphs for let me know in the comments (or via email) and I’ll try to oblige.

Related posts:

1. <A New Sprint Points Method
2. <Comparing Variability In Men’s & Women’s Sprinting
3. <Assessing The Weekend’s Races: Sprint