The *Actual* Sprints

Well, that was fun, wasn't it? The short-course mass-start skate races turned out to be crazy, massive bunch sprints: less than seven seconds covered the first 17 women and only ten seconds separated the first 24 men - almost half the fracking field.

I hope Vegard Ulvang looks at this and tells Jurg Capol that the short mass-start was a bad idea.

But Saturday, there are actual sprints, freestyle of course. No, Kikkan Randall isn't gonna make the podium again.

women's freestyle sprint
1. Majdic
2. Muranen
3. Kowalczyk

men's freestyle sprint
1. Hattestad
2. Hetland
3. Morilov

Rysprintsk

The Demino Sports Club of Rybinsk, Russia, will host three races this weekend, the latest instance of the FIS's attempts to arrange back-to-back-to-back events. The World Cup events at Whistler were the season's first such three-race event, and the season will end with three races at Falun, just as last year's season ended with three races at Bormio.

This is the third straight year in which Rybinsk has hosted World Cup events, which so far have always included mass start skate races ending in sprints. This year, rather than running over the conventional 15km/30km distances, the races will be much shorter: 10km for women, 15km for men.

So let's review: Short distances. Mass starts. A tight track with a downhill run to the finish. Skating.

Doing the math, we can be pretty sure the finishes will be ridiculous sprints. I wouldn't be surprised to see the first ten men inside five seconds, and the first ten women inside ten seconds, with the podium places being decided in each race by a second or less. Super-tight finishes like these have happened a number of times in recent World Cup races.*

If this comes to pass, I don't think it's good for the World Cup. Shouldn't most of the sprinting be left to the sprints? Sure, an occasional sprint finish in a distance race is great, but looking to, say, pro cycling, it would be nice to have some variety: a two-up sprint to the line, a long successful solo or small-group breakaway, a bunch sprint, team tactics to spring someone for the win. As the summary of results below shows, we see this variety more in the women's races than in the men's; for men, the podium places have come down to sprints in eight of the last nine men's mass start races, by my count.

It seems, then, that a mass-start skate on a short course, like Friday's races in Rybinsk, drives almost all the strategy and tactics out of the racing - except for the effort to elbow the way to the front as the field sets up for the sprint. And that's not skiing, I don't think. The result comes down more to chance than it should.

Editorializing aside, I'm going with probabilities, not predictions, for this race, and just saying that the top-seeded racers will race to their bib numbers. Within those groups, just shake some dice.

men's 15km freestyle mass start
top 10: Cologna, Teichmann, Piller Cottrer, Jauhojarvi, Vittoz, Gaillard, Kershaw, di Centa, Legkov

women's 10km freestyle mass start
top 5: Saarinen, Kowalczyk, Kuitunen, Longa, Steira

* As evidence of mass starts almost always ending in sprints, here's how the mass start races over the last three seasons (not including the Olympics or the occasional true mass-start event in the Tours de Ski) have worked out:

Whistler, January 2009
W 15km pursuit
Owing at least in part to the shallowness of the field, this race ended with big time gaps: Kowalczyk won by 7.6s over Longa and 46s over Follis. The top ten were separated by almost two minutes.

M 30km pursuit
Piller Cottrer won easily, but places two through nine were separated by just two seconds.

La Clusaz, December 2008
W 15km F mass start
Steira won by 13s over Saarinen, 14s over Johaug.

M 30km F mass start
Northug won by 0.3s over Cologna, 2.0s over Legkov and di Centa (who tied for third).

Bormio, March 2008
W 10km C mass start
Kuitunen won by 0.6s over Kowaczyk, who had broken away; Bjorgen was behind by 3s.

M 20km C mass start
The only recent men's mass start that didn't end in a sprint: Vittoz broke away to win by 18s over Bauer, 53s over Gjerdalen.

Rybinsk, December 2007
W 15km F mass start
Astrid Jacobsen won the sprint, 0.7s ahead of Korosteleva, 1.1s over Roponen, 1.4s ahead of Sachenbacher-Stehle - about as tight as women's races ever get.

M 30km F mass start
This was a grotesque sprint: Hetland won by 0.5s over Nousiainen, 1.3s over Piller Cottrer, 1.8s over Checchi, 2.1 over Sommerfeldt, and the top 10 finished with within four seconds.

Falun, February 2008
W 15km pursuit
Jacobsen won going away, winning by 6.1s on Bjoergen, 14.3s over Saarinen.

M 30km pursuit
Bauer won by 0.7s over Gjerdalen, 5.8s over Soedergren.

Canmore, January 2008
W 15km pursuit
Kowalczyk won easily, 15.6s over Medvedeva, 22.6s over Rotcheva.

M 30km pursuit
Another big sprint, with the top 10 inside 4 seconds. Pankratov won by 0.4s over di Centa, 0.6s over Teichmann/Angerer (tied), 1.0s over Piller Cottrer, et cetera et cetera.

Falun, March 2007
W 15km pursuit
Bjorgen won by 3.2s over Neumannova, 5.8s over Johaug.

M 15km pursuit
Angerer won by 0.2s over Fredriksson, 0.4s over Jonnier, 1.2s over Soedergren. The top four were covered by 1.2s.

Rybinsk, January 2007
W 15km F mass
Roponen won by 1.4s over Neumannova, 10.4s over Saarinen.

M 30km F mass
Legkov won by 0.5s over Jonnier, 1.1s over Angerer, 2.6s over Piller Cottrer.

La Clusaz, December 2006
W 15km F mass
Kuitunen won by 0.3s over Roponen, 0.7s over Follis; the top five were within 2s.

M 30km F mass
Angerer won by 0.6s over Legkov and 0.8s over Dementiev, with a big gap back to fourth.

FIS Rule Changes We'd Like To See

Sprint courses shall not contain 180 degree turns.

...Especially not in the first 60 seconds of racing. Bottlenecks that force skiers to race single-file should be absolutely unacceptable in a sprint race.

Pole-r Expedition

Okay, okay. I get it. Don't say that Justyna Kowalczyk isn't going to win her races. Duly noted already. I whiffed on Saturday's distance races, failing to pick any of the men on the podium and only one of the women (Saarinen). I am happy to see Lukas Bauer back on form in advance of the home-snow worlds.

Undaunted by my faulty prognostication, here are picks for Sunday's events.

women's classical sprints
1. Justyna Kowalczyk
2. Petra Majdic
3. Aino-Kaisa Saarinen

empirical test of Colin's theories on qualifying
men's classical sprints
1. Ola Vigen Hattestad
2. Eldar Roenning
3. Emil Joensson

Sunday also sees the running of the Marcialonga ski marathon in northern Italy, 70km from Moena through the Val di Fassa and Val di Fiemme and finishing with tough climb to Cavelese. The race is second only to the storied Vasaloppet as a long-distance event, and all the big ski-marathoners are in the race. No Italian man has won since good old Fulvio Valbusa in 2000, so the home-country racers should be gunning for the win. They won't get it this year, with so many of the strong Norwegian and Swedish marathoners competing. My picks:
1. Jerry Ahrlin (Sweden)
2. Marco Cattaneo (Italy)
3. Jorgen Aukland (Norway)

Otepää, I Love Ya

Whether you call it Otepaeae, Otepaa, or Otepää, the traditional World Cup venue in southern Estonia is almost always a good place to race - last year's low snow notwithstanding. The racing is always in the classical technique at Otepää's Tehvandi sports center, and always in front of nutto (and often apparently blotto) Estonian fans, including the requisite group sitting in a damn hot tub.

As Fasterskier says in its preview of the weekend's races, the fields are back to normal size and depth for both the 10/15km interval starts on Saturday and individual sprints on Sunday, after the smaller and shallower fields in Canada. The Italians are persona non grata, but then we know they're no good at classic-technique racing anyhow. My picks:

men's 15km classical
1. Axel Teichmann
2. Anders Aukland*
3. Martin Johnsrud Sundby
N.B. I: No American or Canadian men are racing in Otepää. N.B. II: I don't think good old Jaak Mae is going to pull a podium finish out of his ski hat this year.

women's 10km classical
1. Petra Majdic
2. Therese Johaug
3. Aino-Kaisa Saarinen

As a bonus, here are the five best-named Estonian racers:
1. Aivar Rehemaa
2. Algo Karp
3. Kaija Udras
4. Priit Narusk
5. Martti Himma

* Aukland hasn't had a start yet has had just three starts [thanks, Luke] in this World Cup season, but last week he finished second at the Norwegian national champs in this event. As soon as he finishes in Otepää, he's off to race the Marcialonga on Sunday in Italy.

How Much Do Sprint Qualifiers Matter?

The Andy Newell article piqued my interest -- just how much does sprint qualifying have to do with the final results?

Anyone who qualifies 31st will tell you, "a hell of a lot," but that's not really what I'm talking about. Obviously, you have to ski in the top 30. But Jens Arne Svartedal won Stockholm last year with bib 29, and Otepaa before that with bib 30 -- so qualifying high clearly isn't requirement for success.

In lieu of further hand-wringing, let's look at some real data. The data set is 12 World Cup sprint races from 2007-2009, so we have 355 data points (apparently 5 people got DQ'ed during that time -- Ivanov in Whistler 2009, Rotchev in Stockholm 2008, Kershaw in Kuusaamo 2008, Kruikov in Drammen 2008, and someone else I can't seem to find).

The coefficient of correlation between qualifying position and final position is 0.466. Since 1 would be "perfect correlation" and zero would be "no correlation at all," we're actually closer to qualifying position meaning nothing thanat we are to it meaning everything. Combine that with the fact that the lower places (12-30) are partially ordered by qualifying position and a 0.466 is even less impressive.

Here's the master graph and table -- it's a lot to look at. You can come back later.
In the table, rows are qualifying position and columns are finish position. So we can see from the top left that guys who qualified in the top 5 finished in the top 5 26 times (out of 60 attempts). This is actually the strongest correlation on the entire chart -- 43% of the time, a top-five qualification is converted into a top five finish.

At the other corner we see that the bottom 5 qualifiers finished in the bottom five 16 times, only 29% of the time. So it's more likely that you'll qualify well and finish well than that you'll qualify poorly and finish poorly.

Let's look at where the top five and bottom five come from:

Note that 71.6% of the top five finishers qualified at least 10th, and nearly 87% qualified in the top 15th. Our dataset only has one winner from outside 15th place (Svartedal in Stockholm) and only two in 2nd place (Hetland in Kuusaamo, Kjoelstad in Davos), and two in 3rd place (Pasini in Dusseldorf, Larsson in Kuusamo). It's safe to the say that moving onto the podium from outside the top 15 is very hard.

On the flip side, though, the bottom five distribution is more spread out. The 26th-30th qualifiers are the most prevalent, but after than everyone from 5th-25th is consistently represented. Remember that 26th-30th places are the five people who lost quarterfinals -- in 12 races, someone who qualified 6th-10th straight-up lost their quarterfinal 9 times.

In other words, you can expect someone who should advance to crash out or otherwise botch things completely about 75% of the time. I wonder why this is -- the 6 thru 10 qualifiers are the guys who should theoretically get the second automatically advancing spot from quarters, so perhaps they feel the pressure of being a guy who SHOULD advance, withouth actually having the confidence of knowing they're the fastest in the heat? The 6th-10th finishers lose the heat more often than 21st-25th, probably because they are more likely to crash or blow up trying to hold onto the front than to just try to pick up a few places like the later qualifiers.

The one group that seems to be immune from losing quarterfinals are the top five qualifiers -- in 12 races, this only happened once. One guess who it was.

For the sake of space we'll look at the 6th through 25th spots as line graphs. First up are the distributions for the 6-10 and 21-25 finish spots:
The interesting thing here is that the 6th-10th places are more likely to be occupied by someone who qualified in the top 5 than in the 6-10th slots! This goes along nicely with the "6-10 seeds crash out a lot" theory. And we stay sane by noting the the 21st-25th places are most often occupied by someone who qualified in them.

The least likely occurence here is a top-5 seed falling to 21st-25th (the lowest red point), which only happened twice. This is finishing second-to-last in your quarterfinal after having the top seed, an ignominy reserved for Dusan Kozisek in Canmore and Tore Asle Gjerdalen in Lahti. In Kozisek's defense, he also has one of the four "qualify 21-25, finish 6-10" data points where he qualified 22nd and finished 6th at Lahti.

Finally, the midsection -- 11th through 20th:

The 16-20 graph spikes at 16-20, letting us know that not all is crazy in the world, although this is the lowest spot we seen a decent number of top five qualifiers finishing at-- 7 out of 60 top seeds finished fourth in their quarterfinal.

The 11-15 graph is the flattest of them all -- there are as many top 5 seeds ending up here as bottom five! These are the guys who lost the small final, or finished third in their quarterfinal. Finishing here is a good goal for the 26th-30th qualifiers, who got this high 9 times -- but only broke into 6-10th four times and 1st-5th three times.

There's not too much concrete information to take away here -- the bottom line seems to be, qualifying doesn't mean too much. We can say that qualifying in the top five usually leads to a top 10 finish; qualifying outside the top 15 almost never ends on the podium. But a bad qualifying spot doesn't doom you to a bad finish -- at least on the men's side.

We'll run these numbers again, for women, in the near future -- I'm expected a much higher coefficient of correlation and more absolutes, like "no one has ever made the final with a bib higher than X." Stay tuned.

They Just Don't Make False Starts Like They Used To

I'm sure by now you've heard that Garrott Kuzzy was disqualified from the Whistler Sprint World Cup Friday for, according to fasterskier, "false starting twice." At the time fasterskier went to press there was no video available, but this has since been remedied. You can view the sprints at Universal Sports now, on demand.

So the fasterskier article made Kuzzy sound like a real clown, I mean, what kind of guy manages to get DQ'ed by false starting twice? The kind of guy who doesn't understand how the FIS sprint rules have changed, apparently. Based on the incredible number of false starts we saw throughout the day, it's safe to say that many other athletes don't either.

The first false start is charged to the field, so it doesn't matter who was responsible for the first false start in Kuzzy's heat -- he was responsible for the second, so he's out. (Although, he was clearly responsible for the first false start, so that may have swayed the jury.)

Anyway, in the past a false start has been enforced as "breaking the wand before the gun fires." At Whistler, a false start was defined as "flinching after the SET command is heard." Multiple women's heat were run where someone moved a bit after they said "SET," and they all were called false starts. It happened with such frequency it's hard to believe the athletes were aware of the rule change/strict enforcement (whatever you want to call it). And clearly Kuzzy was not -- on his second false start he only teetered and dropped his hands a split second before the gun fired. The gun went off, but then immediately went off again, signaling a false start. Kuzzy can be heard protesting "but I didn't break the wand" and is obviously incredulous that he's been charged a false start. Of course, the officials werent't even remotely sympathetic, not that they should be.

It will be interesting to see, going forward, if this is a real change dictated by FIS, or a case of the Whistler judges choosing to enforce the rules completely differently than the rest of the World Cup season. Furthermore, based on what my eyes could see, the "false start" that got Kuzzy DQ'ed was complete and utter BS, as several athletes flinched that much in other heats without getting charged. To put it simply -- I blame Canada.