Category: XCFeeds

I recently received the following query from a reader:

I have looked lately into the Junior Worlds results and World Cup/World Championships results of all 2010 Olympic Gold medalists and almost all of them had an outstanding careers while they raced as juniors…If our end goal is to win Olympics then we have to look backwards from it and find common elements. So far the common thread I found based on 2010 Olympic podium athletes that if athlete is not fast by the age 19 the chance of winning Olympics gets very small. I was curious if you looked [at] it from [a] similar angle and from previous Olympic games.

This kind of question comes up a lot, I think, and is related to the posts I’ve been doing that look at plots of age vs. FIS points for skiers broken down by how successful they were at WJC/U23s.

I need to say up front that my ability to tackle this question is extremely limited.  It’s difficult to acquire useful data on top athletes when they were juniors (i.e. prior to age 20 or so).  I focus almost exclusively on results that are available at FIS.  How many junior races abroad aren’t FIS sanctioned?  Even if you start combing the FIS website, you’ll see that results for junior races (other than WJCs) did not really begin to be added with regularity until ~2003.

This means that my only available measure of how fast someone was as a junior is their WJCs results.  Now, I think we can all agree that using two races from one season may not capture how “fast” someone was at that age.  So right off the bat, we should take this with a huge grain of salt.

As long as we keep the data’s limitations firmly in mind, however, I think it can be instructive to look at what we can dig up.

Our starting point is “What, if anything, can we find in common among Olympic medalists?”  The first thing we should note is that there aren’t very many (distance) Olympic medalists.  So right off the bat I’m going to broaden the question to include podium finishes at the Olympics, World Champs or regular World Cups.  This isn’t exactly what my reader asked, but it will allow us to discuss more than a dozen skiers.

So, the first step is to grab the results from all those athletes who’ve podiumed (is that a word?) between 1997-1998 and 2009-2010.  Why start with the 1997-1998 season?  It wouldn’t be fair to include people winning medals in, say, 1995 since my WJC results only go back to 1994, and we don’t really expect juniors to immediately start winning World Cup races (although it can happen).  So we’re going to allow for a solid four year lag before we begin looking for podiums.

Of the resulting 97 men and 59 women, I have WJC results for 52 and 31 of them respectively.  Nearly all of the athletes that we’ve removed are simply too old for me to have WJC results for them.  However, 17 of them (10 men, 7 women) were (I think) eligible to compete in WJCs but did not for some reason.^<1

How did these folks do at WJCs?

Most of them did pretty well (importantly, though, many did not!).  I know, big shocker.

But what about all the skiers who haven’t podiumed?  What were their results like?  That’s the problem with working backwards.  We’re going to keep running into other groups we need to compare our podium winners to.

Instead, let’s turn this around.  Suppose we take all the WJC competitors from 1994 to 2006 (there’s that four year gap again).  Roughly speaking, one of three things could happen to them:

1. A skier could get so few opportunities to race WC, OWG or WSC races that they have no chance of reaching the podium.
2. A skier could get “plenty” of starts but not reach the podium.
3. A skier could get “plenty” of starts and succeed in reaching the podium.

I put plenty in quotes since we have to pick a number of starts.  I picked ten; any cutoff will be arbitrary, but this one makes sense to me.^<2

My question is, what do the WJC results of these three groups look like?

Not surprisingly, the blue group lags behind the other two.  People who don’t ski fast at WJCs are less likely to get the chance to race World Cups.  Our primary interest lies in the red and green groups, and it turns out the differences between them aren’t that big.  For the women, the distributions are extremely similar.

For the men, the more elite podium winners do appear to have WJC results more strongly concentrated near the top.  But a close examination reveals that this difference, in practical terms, is quite small.  Among male skiers with more than ten starts, podium winners’ best WJC results were most likely to be around 4th.  For the non-podium winners, it was most likely to be around 7th or 8th.

We should also point out that the skiers who never get much of a shot on the WC level (blue) come from all different types of WJC results.  Good, bad and in between.  There’s a lot more that goes into determining who continues on in the sport than a handful of WJC results.

Which brings me full circle to my original caveat: we’re using a handful of races as a proxy for a big concept.  It’s tough to capture how fast anyone is with just 2-4 races.  For completeness, though, I’ll post a follow-up on this topic to look at what happens when we look at how often someone reaches the podium, rather than just collapsing the data down to just two categories podiumed/non-podiumed.

Related posts:

1. <Performance vs Age Redux: Grover’s Graph
2. <How Well Prepared Are World Cup Rookies? (Part 1a: Distance)
3. <Podium Heartbreak

The degree to which Distributed Sprint Points sensibly pick out skiers who had large drop offs or improvements between the ’08-’09 and ’09-’10 seasons appears to be mixed.  But for the sake of symmetry, let’s look at the unhappy end of these trends.

The table below shows the male skiers with the biggest drop offs between the two most reason seasons:

Change in average of best five sprint races using my alternative points measure.

The “winner” here is Czech sprinter Ales Razym.  He seemed to be improving steadily, and then something truly catastrophic happened last season.  I don’t know the slightest thing about him, except that he’s young (~23) and Google isn’t telling me much more.  I have a hard time believing that such a dramatic turnaround can’t be somehow linked to illness or injury.  Whatever happened, I hope Razym turns things around next year and gets back to his pre-’09-’10 self.

Norwegian sprinter Boerre Naess only qualified once last season, compared to three times the season before, and his non-qualifying races seemed a bit slower.  But he’s been a fairly consistent sprinter over the years, so this seems a bit unusual.  Injury or illness could be a factor here too.

A few of the other skiers on this list are near the lower limit of the number of races per season to be considered, so only a few races can have a fairly large effect.  Alex Harvey and Tom Reichelt are the primary examples of this.

Finn Sami Jauhojaervi seems like a borderline inclusion here.  Strictly speaking, he had an off season last year, but looking at all of his sprint results together (see below) his ’09-’10 season doesn’t seem dramatically out of line.  Josef Wenzl is another example of someone who posted an off year, but one that seems within the “normal” range for his entire career.

Torin Koos is a potentially controversial inclusion, given his recent exclusion from the USST and the commentary that decision prompted.  I think its undeniable that ’09-’10 wasn’t his best season, as he clearly struggled to qualify.  But I think his inclusion here is pretty borderline, and given that I’m experimenting with an entirely different method for calculating sprint points here, I wouldn’t read too much into this.

Related posts:

1. <Trends In US Skiing Performance: Sprint

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a onblur=”try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}” href=”http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H2SCM3lmKm8/TFbjQBECv0I/AAAAAAAADlk/LfKszryYOuY/s1600/IMG_5308.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/TFbjQBECv0I/AAAAAAAADlk/LfKszryYOuY/s400/IMG_5308.JPG” border=”0″ alt=””id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5500833859182444354″ //abr /Mackenzie Rizio will be joing us for winter term. She will be in 7th grade and she is a first year J3 coming from the Prospect BKL program. Mackenzie is the oldest of four children and she lives in Wilmington, Vt. She will be a day student and plans to car pool with Mackenzie Fisher (cute eh? Maybe they will get married and have the same names!).br /Mackenzie is a “spark plug”, full of energy and stories. She does not like chili dogs, but she does like long walks on the beach. She is an accomplished “scrap-booker” and she loves salads (especially pasta salad). br /We are all looking forward to having Mackenzie join the team!div class=”blogger-post-footer”img width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/tracker/4680416899705879324-26694497811693875?l=smsxc.blogspot.com’ alt=” //div

The Comp Team returned from Girdwood yesterday after four more training sessions since our last update.

Thursday afternoon we met up with ANR who was just arriving for a camp of their own for a classic technique and specific strength session.  It was a nice low-key session after the morning TT, and gave everyone a chance to work in small groups with some new athletes and different coaches.

Friday morning we got up early and jogged down to the Girdwood school for some strength before jogging home to some blueberry pancakes, Olympic sprint relay coverage on the TV and some nap/downtime.  Upon waking it was time for lunch, some video and our big OD session of the week.  Getting that all in proved to take a little longer than expected, so we left a bit late for Potter Marsh, the start of our 7.5 (12k) or 9.4 mile (15k) run along the Turnagain Arm trail – the first leg of our OD.  From Rainbow or Windy Corner (12 and 15k endpoints, respectively) we regrouped in the vehicles and headed to Indian to start on the bike path to Girdwood for a 11 or 21, or even 25 km ski for the two that chose to ski the whole way home.  The headwind was vicious along the Arm as we went back to Girdwood, and we definitely suffered the effects of a few wind-blown poles planting between the legs.  Sometimes you have to face such gnarly conditions in races, so it’s good to have some experience and learn how to adapt your movements in training.

It was quite an epic session, but we (I) hadn’t estimated the time quite right on it, so we returned home to a porch-full of ANR athletes and coaches who we’d invited over to dinner 30 minutes before we got back.  Oops…

Before packing and cleaning out our rental Saturday morning, we headed down to the bike path for one last ski.  Rather than a normal, boring specific strength session, we chose to spice things up with the Girdwood Specific Strength Championships.  Head-to-head double-pole and single-stick races on a mildly uphill or downhill course.  Skiers advanced through a single-gender bracket with world cup points being assigned to the order they finished in the bracket.  Perfectly fair?  Heck no.  But it served it’s purpose as a motivator to bring energy to the last session at the end of a long week.

Here are some pictures, interspersed with results from various results from the week:

A few of the ladies during DP 30-30s on Tuesday afternoon

Willie on his DP

Half the crew

Kira zips by…

As part of a lighter day on Wednesday we were going to go for a long, low-intensity hike in the afternoon.  In a scene that makes me wonder how many aspiring politicians we have on the team, various groups of athletes lobbied for the hike or for playing games, with the lady-dominated games-group eventually passing around a paper ballot while most of the fellas were scouring their duffle bags for the most hideous piece of short lycra and a pair of tall dark socks they could find to go hiking in crow pass while pretending to be foreign tourists.  Political diligence prevailed and then we had a guys vs. girls soccer game where the boys won ~10-7 (NB: Girls scored one goal which counted for 7 points).

Note how the ladies turned the tide on outfits too…

Stefan completes the Uphill TT on Thursday morning

Run up Alyeska? Neill approves.

Pat watches racers make their way up the climb

Kira sprints for the line with Julia at her side

Friday's OD run and ski. The front boys descend to Rainbow Creek at about mile 7 of the Turnagain Arm Trail.

Neill, Nick and Dan

Turnagain Arm Trail run? Neill approves

Wishing for wingsuits: Windy Corner, Turnagain Arm, AK

Dan, the Seward Highway, and the Arm

LiLi and Megan descend to the run's end.

Skeeto beautifies her boot (which she gained, along with a contusion and a pair of crutches, from the soccer match earlier in the week – she still hung around for strength, videoing teammates, and even tried her first rollerski the last morning of camp)

Wildflowers along the side of the bike path add a soothing touch to a long workout

Claire shows the new splatter paint job on her roller skis – the effect of catching a ski pole in the wind and taking a tumble.

Looking out over the glacier

Looking out over the glacier

Looking out over the glacier

Looking out over the glacier

Pictures from my friend’s wedding in California where Zach and I debuted our talents as florists!

Starting to work on the arrangements for tables.

Putting the finishing touches on the bouquets.

The table arrangements all finished!

Boutonnieres for the groom and groomsmen.

The tables all set for the reception dinner…a beautiful location!

Zach and I right before the ceremony-notice the beautiful bouquet!