Category: XCFeeds

a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TFyrM2QnXqI/AAAAAAAADmE/89kgL8tzU7U/s1600/IMG_5309.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/TFyrM2QnXqI/AAAAAAAADmE/89kgL8tzU7U/s400/IMG_5309.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5502461081951887010″ //abr /Nick “stretch” Murphy joins us from the Gunstock program. Nick plans to take Environmental Science and an on-line course to keep his brain busy while he is not training.. He has defered from Colby and will be joining Skyler and Austin as PG’s in our program.br /Nick has been training with us over the summer. He is a fast runner and he has been working on his endurance since his track season ended in early June. He has been known to attend some OD’s without enough fluid and he has paid the price more than once. br /Nick enjoys music (especially Taylor Swift) and corn dogs.br /We look forward to having him join us full time next month.div class=”blogger-post-footer”img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4680416899705879324-8532422667044211932?l=smsxc.blogspot.com’ alt=” //div

My Summer of Weddings continues this weekend, with some travel and a race to follow.  Fun times!  Here’s what we’ve acomplished at Statistical Skier this week:

• Putting Distributed Sprint Points to good use we looked at the most unimproved male sprinters from last season.
• Following a suggestion from a reader, I looked at whether there might be a relationship between a skier’s World Junior results and winning medals.  The results were murky.
• We took a closer look at how Marcus Hellner faired versus his arch-rival Petter Northug last season.
• Finally, we wrapped up the list of cross-country skier retirements with a look back at the career of Swiss skier Laurence Rochat.

Related posts:

1. <Week In Review: Friday, June 11th
2. <Week In Review: Friday, June 18th
3. <Week In Review: Friday July 16th

Who?  Yeah, I’d never heard of her either.  One of the coolest parts of working on this website is learning how much I didn’t know about international ski racing.

The fact that I don’t know about this Swiss skier doesn’t really say anything about her (she’s done 115 World Cup races, 7 World Championship races and 4 Olympic races!), rather it says something about hard it can be to follow international ski racing from the US.  So, working on this website has made me a much more informed fan of the sport…

Still, Rochat isn’t exactly a household name, so it isn’t surprising that she hasn’t racked up a ton of top results.  Still, she won a Bronze medal in Salt Lake in the relay; she’s finished in the top-20 in World Cup (or Tour de Ski) races 19 times.  Her best was an 8th in a freestyle sprint.  She also finished 15th at the Turin Olympics sprint event.  And just for variety, she has a 12th in a 30km classic mass start at the 2005 World Champs.  Finally, Rochat won the Engadin marathon in 2007.  From the perspective of a fan of US skiing, that career is nothing to shake a stick at.

Let’s take a look at her distance results:

Is this general development pattern becoming familiar to you?  Cause I’ve spent countless hours with this data, and this is pretty classic.  Improve steadily, have a few good seasons, decline.  Pretty textbook.  Her best season overall was 2003-2004.

Her Engadin victory isn’t on here, since I don’t have FIS points for that race, but it probably would have been one of her better ones.  Still, she never really cracked her way below 25 FIS points.

One thing I’d like to note is her one great World Juniors race (in gray, 1998), where she finished 6th in the 5km freestyle.  While Rochat had an excellent career by a lot of standards, she certainly didn’t go on from this result to dominate the World Cup circuit, or even really contend with the leaders.  A single good result at World Juniors doesn’t mean you have a superstar in the making.

How about technique?

A clear win for classic here, at least from mid-career forward.  A curious victory, though.  Her best races tended to be classic, but she had plenty of slow classic races too.

I’m going to skip looking at her results by race length (because it isn’t very interesting) and move on to sprinting:

So I think we can conclude that Rochat might have preferred sprinting.  She certainly managed to qualify for the elimination rounds on a regular basis, at least until the last few years.  Did she have a technique preference in sprinting?

Note: y-axis label should be Rank not FIS Points.

Oh ho!  What have we here?  Someone who’s better at classic in distance races, but better at skating in sprints?  It would appear so!  Yes, it’s pretty weird that I get excited about this kind of stuff.

Related posts:

1. <Career Retrospective: Rene Sommerfeldt
2. <Career Retrospective: Sabina Valbusa
3. <Career Retrospective: Sara Renner

Nailed.  15 of 18 PRs.  12 of 15 in the AM and 3 of 3 during the PM test despite a wet course.  Improvements of up to 20-25% over previous tests, PRs and from a year ago.  6 of 8 who ran the test at the end of July last year improved by 10% or more.  And all of this is from a lot of double pole impulse strength (we’ve been shooting for 20 sets a week), consistent general strength training and rollerskiing, but not a ton of focused double pole distance or high intensity this summer.

Potential for more improvement?  You betcha.  The challenge has been laid down.  Fall is coming and the stoke is high.  ONIT!

That’s what Marcus Hellner says, according to FasterSkier.  Let’s go to the numbers, shall we?

These are all the times these two guys raced against each other last season (distance races, anyway).  Positive values indicate a victory for Hellner and vice versa.  You can see Northug’s strength in mass start races, and that Northug had two unusually bad races.  A handful of Northug’s wins were by very small margins and two of them were in stage race prologues, which, let’s face it, are kind of lame.  Still, I would give Northug a slight edge here.

Related posts:

1. <Head-to-Head

We’re picking up from where we left off last time, so go check that out to get up to speed.

What happens if instead of only looking at two groups (skiers reaching the podium, skiers not reaching the podium) we get a little more sophisticated and include more information?

First, let’s just look to see what relationship there might be between someone’s best WJC result and their best WC, OWG or WSC result:

It may look tempting to conclude that these two variables are correlated, but there’s less here than meets the eye.  Beyond a best WJC result of 20th, there really isn’t much of a relationship at all.  Below 20th, it seems like there might be one, but consider how variable the data are around the blue trend line.  How informative is it when the data vary by as many as 40-60 places around the trend?

Another way we could disaggregate the data is to consider the number of times a skier has reached the podium, rather than just yes/no.  This means we’re limiting ourselves to a much smaller number of skiers, of course.  And we need to correct for the length of each skier’s career:

This is just a plot of each skier’s best WJC results versus the number of podium finishes per year they’ve had since their last WJC race.  I’ve omitted the trend lines this time, but the relationship it actually even weaker.

All this isn’t to say that nothing can be learned from Olympic medalists.  Far from it.  But we certainly can’t go very far with only WJC results to go on as a proxy for “speed as a junior”, and even if we fixed this problem, my guess is that it would be tough to see systematic differences.  It just seems unlikely to me that there are (statistically significant) differences between the people finishing in the top three versus the people finishing in 4th-10th.

Related posts:

1. <Performance vs Age Redux: Grover’s Graph
2. <Podium Heartbreak
3. <Post-WJC/U23 Development: Canada