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Junior + U23 Development Index – Men

Posted on 2024-03-31 | by Zunzunegui | Leave a Comment on Junior + U23 Development Index – Men

So following on from the previous article about the top 30 women under my development ranking system, it’s time to look at the junior and U23 men likewise. Interestingly, however, there are fewer U23 men competing in the top teams at the highest level at present, with Norwegian youngsters hitting against a roadblock of veteran and established talent that just isn’t underperforming enough to give them a chance, the Swedes and the Germans looking at fairly slow and gradual athlete development processes that mean their promoted talents this year are in the 24-25 age range, and many of the established young stars of the World Cup who emerged recently, such as Tommaso Giacomel or Niklas Hartweg, having aged out of the U23 ranks. The fact that men’s biathlon does not have the same kind of turnover of talent as women’s biathlon can be attributed to a couple of factors, one of which of course is that we have had a number of prominent women take time out for parenthood over the years, but the perception (not always the reality) is that more women hit the ground running at the top level while still in their junior years than men. 2023-24 would appear to be one of the seasons to reinforce that perception; the only one of the biggest teams to have an established World Cup name still eligible in the U23 ranks was the French. As a result, beyond the very top it was wide open as to who could establish themselves as the pre-eminent young prospects in men’s biathlon.

How it works

A quick recap of the scoring system, as this was explained previously:

  • World Cup points are valued at 5x IBU Cup points. This includes the bonus point for positions 41-60, and makes IBU Cup podiums equivalent to finishing 25th-30th at the World Cup level.
  • World Championship results are valued at 20% higher than World Cup points.
  • European Championship results are valued at 20% higher than IBU Cup points.
  • IBU Junior Cup points are valued at 0.2x IBU Cup points.
  • Junior World Championships are valued at 0.6x IBU Cup points at the Junior level and 0.3x for the Youth level
  • Other races with restricted start lists such as the Youth Olympics, EYOF or Universiade are scored at 0.1x IBU Cup points.

Once all points are tallied up, this is divided by the number of races entered (minimum 5) to arrive at a development score. The reason for the 5 race minimum is that athletes who race fewer events than this will have a greater degree of uncertainty as to whether their performance is sustainable, and also these are often national calendar athletes who enter championship races with higher points tallies and can see their results fluctuate much more heavily due to a single good or bad race. Therefore any athletes completing fewer than 5 IBU-sanctioned competitions in the season will see their total score divided by 5.

This 5-race minimum was far more significant in respect of the men, as we did see some athletes make the top 30 despite their only international racing being at the Junior World Championships – largely the product of the strength in depth of the Norwegian team and that they traditionally do not compete on the IBU Junior World Cup, preferring to develop their younger athletes within the domestic competitions.

As with the women, a quick disclaimer that while I’ve laid out the results as a top 30, it is important to note that this is less an indication of athletes’ relative talent level as much as it is an indication of athletes’ relative World Cup readiness. The higher the score, the more competitive the athlete would be expected to be at the top level. This was originally posted up on the forum, but has been revised as more of an editorial here.

#30: Matija Legović (CRO)

15/11/2005 (U19)
World Cup: 0 points from 2 races
European Championships: 0 points from 1 race
IBU Cup: 59 points from 8 races
Youth World Championships: 146 points from 3 races
Junior World Cup: 278 points from 5 races
Total points: 169.4
Development Index score: 8.92

I will say right now, I think Matija Legović is the biggest Croatian talent since Jakov Fak, and were he from a different nation he may well have a better score here; however being as the team is small in both numbers and resources, they essentially travel around as a single unit and so Matija has been competing at World Cup and European Championship races that he may not be ready to produce points-scoring level performances at. Nevertheless, a colossal PPR in excess of 50 at the Junior World Cup level – suggesting he would be averaging out at being at least in the flower ceremony every race – suggests he would be more than ready to move up to at least a permanent IBU Cup spot, and as an U19 that’s a good sign. It’s just that if he wants to deliver on his promise he may have to go the route that Jakov Fak went, and latch on to a better-funded team, as I’m not sure the Croatian team have the resources to back him all the way I’m afraid, or he may be forced to bounce around the levels depending on where the team are deploying the more established Krešimir Crnković.

#29: Arttu Heikkinen (FIN)

20/04/2004 (U20)
World Cup: 0 points from 1 race
European Championships: 5 points from 2 races
IBU Cup: 75 points from 7 races
Junior World Championships: 45 points from 3 races
Junior World Cup: 144 points from 3 races
Total points: 142.8
Development Index score: 8.93

A tough first year in Juniors for Finland’s best prospect, Heikkinen dropped back somewhat in his results at the IBU Cup level (last year he had 184 points in 8 races thanks to a super start to the season), but he made his World Cup debut and was at least pretty solid in the Junior World Championships, having a bad Mass Start but being 16th and 21st in the two individual start events. He also didn’t really spend much time at the Junior World Cup at all, only entering the Junior Euros where he won the sprint fairly convincingly; a best on the IBU Cup of 13th is promising but far from stand-out, although he has plenty of time on his side, noting that Otto Invenius only really broke out this season in his second post-junior year. The Finns seem to be pivoting toward more attention being paid to their junior and post-junior prospects in the last year or two and Heikkinen is currently, you’d say, their best placed athlete to profit from that. But he’s far from the finished article yet, and the fact he couldn’t clear all targets in any races this season points to where he will need to improve to continue to progress moving forward.

#28: Sondre Slettemark (GRL)

10/09/2004 (U20)
World Cup: 0 points from 2 races
IBU Cup: 127 points from 9 races
Junior World Championships: 29 points from 3 races
Junior World Cup: 177 points from 6 races
Total points: 184.8
Development Index score: 9.24

As a curio, with the junior races no longer available to her and with limited progress in terms of ski speed, Sondre actually outscored his big sister Ukaleq this season (she regressed from 15.29 in her U22 year to just 3.58 this season). He made a World Cup debut in Östersund but perhaps unsurprisingly as a first year junior competing for Greenland he didn’t trouble the scorers. 9 races – all in the points – in the IBU Cup is pretty solid, although apart from a single 9th place these were mostly lower placements, and a disappointing Junior World Championships limited his score. Nevertheless, he has two more years to compete at the Junior levels and he had an average of 29.5 PPR at the Junior World Cup suggesting he averages around a 12th place finish, which is certainly not bad, although I fear he will hit against the same glass ceiling his sister has when graduating juniors.

#27: Luděk Abrahám (CZE)

22/03/2002 (U22)
European Championships: 0 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 141 points in 11 races
Junior World Championships: 66 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 45 points in 1 race
Total points: 196.6
Development Index score: 10.92

A fairly solid season for Abrahám in his final junior year. The Czechs are a decent midfield team, and Abrahám slots perfectly into that kind of role it would seem, performing decently but not especially spectacularly at the IBU Cup level, but reaching a flower ceremony at Idre on the one occasion in the entire season that he managed to close all of his targets in an individual race. He did manage to temper this with some washout races, and notably was well off the pace at the European Championships, but a top 10 in the Junior World Championships Sprint shows that he can be pretty solid in the higher prestige races too. He finished the season relatively strongly so confidence should be high as he moves on to his post-junior years, where I would suspect he needs a bit more seasoning on the IBU Cup before he’ll be ready for the World Cup.

#26: Fabian Kaskel (GER)

26/11/2003 (U21)
IBU Cup: 91 points in 7 races
Junior World Cup: 76 points in 3 races
Total points: 110.2
Development Index score: 11.02

Kaskel caught a few eyes in the pre-season selection races in Germany and jumping up to the IBU Cup as a second-year junior was definitely promising. However, he was found out a bit at that level, struggling to provide competitive ski speed and although he only missed the points once (a forgettable outing in a sprint in Idre), he was consistently just over 2 minutes back on 10/10 shooting in sprint races throughout December, and the strong performances of his contemporaries Linus Kesper and Leonhard Pfund on the Junior Cup, who then outperformed him at the IBU Cup level, saw him exiled to the Junior Cup for a while before he brought his season to a halt. It is still forward progress from last year, but he will need to recover that momentum and more to avoid being perceived as a Decemberist and/or becoming lost in the shuffle among his contemporaries in Germany, especially as some previously highly rated younger athletes on the team who did not race internationally this season, such as Albert Engelmann, would be expected to be gunning for the same spots.

#25: Konrad Badącz (POL)

16/01/2003 (U21)
World Championships: 11 points in 3 races
World Cup: 10 points in 11 races
Junior World Championships: 121 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 26 points in 1 race
Total points: 208.8
Development Index score: 11.60

It’s rather surprising, but Badącz is the only Pole to make the top 30; Jan Guńka went 3-2-8 at the Junior World Championships compared to Badącz’s 7-7-5, however both athletes spent much of the season at the World Cup given the limited resources available to the Polish team and the men’s team’s relatively quiet status for the last… well, since Tomasz Sikora retired, and Badącz’s superior World Cup performance and especially the fact that he made two top 40 results AND set his personal best of 31st at the World Championships means he makes the top 30 while Guńka does not. Both of the pair made 3 top 60s in Individuals and Pursuits out of 11 starts at the World Cup level, Badącz also managed to twice score Sprint finishes outside of the points but close enough that he was able to move forward into the points – routinely performing better H2H which augurs well for World Cup racing where this is more common. He’s also a year younger than Guńka so while Guńka had the better performances in the Championship races, he also has a tendency to be less competitive on an ongoing period so although he may have a slightly higher peak performance, Badącz is much more consistent and probably projects to be the slightly better prospect overall.

#24: Jonáš Mareček (CZE)

13/02/2001 (U23)
World Championships: 0 points in 1 race
World Cup: 30 points in 15 races
Total points: 190
Development Index score: 11.88

It’s been fairly slow progress this season for Mareček – his score last year would have been 8.93 – but in his first post-juniors year he built on his performance, increasing his World Cup workload from 10 to 15 races and scoring at a higher – although still very limited – rate, as well as receiving an increased number of relay opportunities. His World Cup individual races left him with an average finish of ~39th, hardly setting the world alight, but he’s been at least a steady hand; even if regularly finishing outside the points he is almost invariably giving himself a chance to recover a result from that, because until Oslo’s Individual he had never failed to make the top 50 on the World Cup – it’s just that he was frequently ending up between 41st and 50th in the process, with no fewer than 7 races on that page of the results sheet. His most memorable moments have largely come as part of the relays, not least at the World Championships where he was handed over to just 5 seconds off the lead, and while he lost around a minute on his leg, we should be wary of judging him too harshly on that, given he was up against Johannes Thingnes Bø.

#23: Blagoy Todev (BUL)

06/07/2001 (U23)
World Championships: 0 points in 2 races
World Cup: 21 points in 7 races
European Championships: 0 points in 2 races
IBU Cup: 25 points in 2 races
Total points: 156
Development Index score: 12.00

The best young male Bulgarian talent and a former medallist at the youth level, Todev has kind of been a victim of the small size of his team for a while, struggling to find a role at the World Cup when lower levels may have been better for his development. However, in his first post-junior year, he started slowly and improved as the year went on, scoring his first World Cup points in Oslo and then improving his PB to 32nd on the World Cup in the sprint at Soldier Hollow before backing that up by holding that rank in the following pursuit. With four World Cup top 60s and another at the World Championships he is starting to move into the realms of being somebody capable of reasonable World Cup points, especially as those points-scoring results were all with missed targets in them as well suggesting he could have gained significantly more had he shot at his best. The team have never replaced Anev following his retirement, and Iliev has been somewhat distracted this season with fatherhood, so Todev may be counted on to shoulder the load for the Bulgarian men in the near future.

#22: Anton Ivarsson (SWE)

27/01/2001 (U23)
World Cup: 0 points in 6 races
European Championships: 38 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 142 points in 8 races
Total points: 199.6
Development Index score: 12.04

2023-24 was a challenging season for Ivarsson in his first junior year, making his debut at the World Cup level but being unable to really break through to the points; his performance relative to last year went backwards at the other levels as well (he did not race juniors in 2022-23 at all) but by so little as to say that he was fairly consistent and this was stagnation rather than regression (IBU Cup PPR went from 19.83 to 17.75) but it’s the fact that he struggled to make the top 60 let alone the points at the World Cup level that has hurt him; last year he had a score of 21.57 which was scored almost entirely at the IBU Cup level and has reduced thanks largely to those World Cup outings; however there were some positive signs late in the season, with his best results coming in the final trimester, scoring his first top 60 in Oslo and then only just missing the points in consecutive races in Canmore. Something to build on if he can hold his place in the team.

#21: Christoph Pircher (ITA)

03/07/2003 (U21)
European Championships: 7 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 185 points in 14 races
Junior World Championships: 65 points in 3 races
Total points: 242.4
Development Index score: 12.12

Pircher is Italy’s third strongest athlete at the IBU Cup level, but Daniele Cappellari is no longer a prospect and David Zingerle is pushing 25 so approaching put-up-or-shut-up time as well; he also didn’t outperform Pircher much, with the younger (second year junior) athlete going at a PPR of 13.21 – not spectacular but at least solid – at the level. It’s his first year of racing against senior athletes too as last season he was competing solely at the Junior Cup, where he averaged almost 40 PPR so seemed to have little left to prove. While he definitely isn’t World Cup ready yet and probably should spend next season at the IBU Cup too, it is worth noting that he scored two top 10s at the IBU Cup this season – both in sprints – but his other best result of 11th, came in a Mass Start 60, as did his best showing (7th) in the Junior World Championships, which shows adaptability to H2H racing. The flip side, however, is that in three relays he did across the IBU Cup and Junior World Championships, he did penalty loops in all three (averaging two per race) and he only cleared all his targets once all season, so that’s an area of improvement to isolate for him going forward.

#20: Maxime Germain (USA)

21/08/2001 (U23)
World Championships: 0 points in 1 race
World Cup: 0 points in 7 races
European Championships: 62 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 100 points in 4 races
Total points: 183.4
Development Index score: 12.23

Born in Juneau and raised in Chamonix before moving back to America after his interest in biathlon had already been piqued, the Alaska-native Germain already had plenty of experience at the World and IBU Cup before graduating juniors, but has yet to break through to the points at the World Cup level. In fact, he couldn’t best last year’s top result of 45th either. However, no longer able to supplement his results at the Junior level, he did score more points at the IBU Cup level, though at a similar kind of rate to that which he managed last season – in fact plugging last year’s results in, they result in a very similar score of 12.89, suggesting Germain has possibly hit a bit of a ceiling in his development unless the results of others in the team (most notably somebody higher up this countdown) can energise some investment in the US squad. American athletes tend to break through and develop later than many, though that is often due to the college system and as far as I can tell Germain doesn’t compete on the NCAA circuit (which usually targets XC rather than biathlon anyway).

#19: Fabian Müllauer (AUT)

02/02/2003 (U21)
European Championships: 0 points in 1 race
IBU Cup: 168 points in 9 races
Junior World Championships: 77 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 328 points in 10 races
Total points: 284.8
Development Index score: 12.38

Austria’s strongest male junior prospect, Müllauer had a pretty competitive season split between the Junior and IBU Cups this year, and given his IBU Cup PPR is 18.67 this suggests that like Andexer he is a bit held back by the amount of racing the Austrian team had him do at the Junior Cup where fewer points are available on my scoring system. However, there is one thing which is very clear when discussing Müllauer as an athlete, and that’s that he needs to work on his shooting. When he gets the shooting mostly right, he is highly promising – his best of 6th on the IBU Cup came in a sprint with 9/10 and he also made 5th at the Junior World Championships in the same discipline in similar fashion. He clearly has a high ceiling but he’s a boom-or-bust athlete as a result. At the Junior Cup level, his speed is enough that he can get away with his profligacy with the rifle (he had sprint podiums at Ridnaun and Jakuszyce with 6/10 and 7/10 respectively) but a 67.2% shooting record in individual races season-long is always going to hold him back unless he can up that hit rate significantly. He still has high potential, but he projects to be a Julian Eberhard type as his ceiling unless he can improve his performance in the range.

#18: Antonin Guy (FRA)

16/02/2006 (U18)
Junior World Championships: 147 points in 3 races
Youth Olympic Games: 180 points in 2 races
Total points: 62.1
Development Index score: 12.42

The youngest of all the athletes to make the top 30 of either gender, Guy is the only 2006 athlete to get a high enough score to feature – not bad when you consider 2 of the 5 eligible races he entered were the Youth Olympic Games where the maximum score would only net you a score of 9. But the crucial thing is that he did get that score of 9, winning both races in Gangwon and then also winning the Youth Individual at the Junior Worlds for good measure. While he couldn’t keep it up and only managed 14th and 6th in the other two races, showing that winning mentality is always helpful and interestingly 2/3 of those wins were in Individuals, with 17/20 and 19/20 respectively. I’m cautious about getting overexcited about a youth athlete who wins a lot largely in shooting-biased events, after people like Aristide Bègue stalled out and especially as the ski distances are reduced but the penalties remain the same at the youth level, but simultaneously he also showed very good capability in relays and the Mass Start 60 so he does have all the tools if he can harness them going forward.

#17: Tobias Alm (NOR)

07/09/2002 (U22)
Junior World Championships: 113 points in 3 races
Total points: 67.8
Development Index score: 13.56

Tobias Alm is probably the biggest question mark on the entire list for me. He’s in his final junior year, and he has no FIS profile so sticks exclusively to biathlon, but the 2024 Junior World Championships in Otepää are his first results to appear in the IBU’s database and he hasn’t stood out to me especially in Norgescup results either for me to have picked up on his name and paid attention the way people like Gerhardsen did when I saw their names in the Junior World Championships selection. However, that’s seemingly more a reflection of the insane strength in depth of the Norwegian team (after all, the Norgescup is also full of athletes between 23 and 27 who could compete internationally for many a nation) than an indictment of Alm’s talent level because he was able to finish top 15 in both the Individual and Sprint before securing a Norwegian 1-2-3 with bronze in the MS60. Being outshone by younger and more established fellow juniors means that he might be a bit roadblocked until some older athletes retire, but that’s unfortunately the price you pay for the level of competition on the Norwegian calendar. It produces elite talents – but it also means not everybody that has the talent to make it can.

#16: Renars Birkentals (LAT)

23/05/2001 (U23)
World Championships: 0 points in 2 races
World Cup: 33 points in 12 races
European Championships: 36 points in 3 races
Total points: 234.2
Development Index score: 13.78

Birkentals has impressed me this season; last year he was largely out of his depth in the senior fields but scoring decently on the Junior Cup, but with this being his first post-junior year he was forced to make the step up to the senior levels and sink or swim. Östersund was very uncompetitive but from Hochfilzen through to Antholz he was consistently in or around the fringes of the points at the World Cup level, with a best of 27th at the Oberhof sprint. However, he couldn’t maintain this kind of performance level forever and his form dropped away in the final trimester, falling down to the ranks of the 80s and 90s in the North American rounds at the end of the season. As a result his overall World Cup PPR is only 2.75, but nevertheless this season at least suggests even if you have to accept a few washout races, he is going to get you into the top 40 with some regularity. The Latvians have been a one-man team around Andrejs Rastorgujevs for as long as I can care to remember, but Birkentals looks to be the closest they’ve been to having any kind of succession plan in a long time.

#15: Linus Kesper (GER)

06/03/2003 (U21)
European Championships: 30 points in 2 races
IBU Cup: 38 points in 3 races
Junior World Championships: 105 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 158 points in 4 races
Total points: 172.6
Development Index score: 14.38

While 2003 is perhaps perceived as a weaker prospect year on the women’s side, it’s probably the strongest year in a while for the German men, and Linus Kesper is one of the main prospects in that pipeline. While contemporary Fabian Kaskel got the season started better, Kesper started out on the Junior Cup where he podiumed on debut and earned his way into the European Championships (which was something of a surprising selection, but he repaid the selectors’ faith with a top 20 on debut there too) and an IBU Cup place, and then scored a 6th and a bronze medal at the Junior World Championships, although he had a bad MS60 that affects his rating here. It was a close and interesting battle between him and Leonhard Pfund for the top German junior actually, with Kesper performing better at the European Championships but Pfund better at the Junior Worlds. I look forward to their rivalry driving some German development in the years to come.

#14: Kasper Ågheim Kalkenberg (NOR)

27/05/2005 (U19)
Youth World Championships: 255 points in 3 races
Total points: 76.5
Development Index score: 15.30

The almost undisputable top talent among the men’s youth field, Kalkenberg is another part of that tradition of biathlon families in Norway, as – as you can probably guess – he’s Emilie’s brother. Unfortunately given the Norwegian propensity not to fulfil their allocations at the IBU Junior Cup, we seldom get to see him racing internationally, but when he does he tends to knock it out of the park; he was already a winner of the Youth World Championships sprint in 2022-23, but this year he decided to step up his performance, finishing 2nd in the Individual and then winning both the sprint and MS60, with Matija Legović the only athlete who could even come close to matching his time on the skis. He only lost out by 9 seconds in the Individual despite an extra miss and the shorter ski laps as well. His score is restricted somewhat because he entered fewer than 5 IBU-sanctioned races and we haven’t seen him compete against U22s let alone seniors, but he is clearly capable of far more than he’s able to show against U19s only.

#13: Leonhard Pfund (GER)

17/05/2003 (U21)
European Championships: 13 points in 2 races
IBU Cup: 101 points in 5 races
Junior World Championships: 122 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 176 points in 4 races
Total points: 229
Development Index score: 16.36

As mentioned when I covered Linus Kesper at #15, the two German 2003 prospects largely followed the same calendar and were closely matched throughout. However, Pfund earned his promotion to the IBU Cup sooner after winning on the Junior Cup in Ridnaun, and had a better IBU Cup best, with a pair of 12th places at Martell and – again – Ridnaun. The main crux of Pfund’s season, however, was the Junior World Championships, where much like Kesper he had one bad race (in his case the sprint) and two good ones, with 10th in the MS60 and, more importantly, the gold medal in the Individual after hitting 19/20 and outskiing Lejeune. He has another year of junior eligibility but I suspect he will be up on the IBU Cup full-time next season with Doll retiring and Riethmüller likely earning semi-permanent promotion, and will look to improve on his PPR of 20.2 at that level.

#12: Théo Guiraud Poillot (FRA)

01/01/2002 (U22)
European Championships: 72 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 222 points in 14 races
Junior World Championships: 58 points in 3 races
Total points: 355.2
Development Index score: 17.76

Guiraud Poillot is one of a few French juniors who are trying to break through the IBU Cup ceiling as they graduate juniors, and also an illustration of one of the foibles of the system – he has a higher score than Ivarsson by far despite a lower IBU Cup PPR (15.86 as against 17.75) and no World Cup results; however, TGP proved far stronger in the European Championships, whereas Ivarsson’s development hopes will be stalled somewhat by the difficulty adapting to the World Cup. The problem for Guiraud Poillot, like a couple of his French contemporaries, is that his ski speed is probably going to need work for him to be able to succeed at the World Cup level, although this does appear less of an issue than for Lejeune, Jefferies or Garnier in the same age group. He wasn’t far off Rastorgujevs at the European Championships, but that was his peak vs. Rastorgujevs’ racing for form, but it gives an illustration of where he might be if he can progress into his first post-junior year next season.

#11: Damien Levet (FRA)

29/06/2001 (U23)
European Championships: 0 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 426 points in 20 races
Total points: 441
Development Index: 19.17

Levet has been the model of consistency in his first post-junior year, spending the whole season at the IBU Cup and neither really looking like getting promoted, nor ever looking like he was struggling or out of his depth. His only results out of the points were at the European Championships, however, which is a concern as it showed him to not be able to compete when the stronger field arrived at the level. He only had two visits to the flower ceremony all season – a sprint/pursuit double back in Idre – and these were his only top 10s as well. As a result he has the problem of being consistent at this level but, despite his stronger overall performance, he is likely to be behind Guiraud Poillot in the promotion queue due to being perceived as having a lower performance ceiling. The dominance of the Norwegians at this level does skew expectations a little, but he probably needs to get that PPR of just over 20 up to at least 30 and probably closer to 40 before the team is likely to try him at the World Cup.

#10: Vitalii Mandzyn (UKR)

05/04/2003 (U21)
World Cup: 12 points in 6 races
European Championships: 54 points in 2 races
IBU Cup: 167 points in 7 races
Junior World Championships: 103 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 153 points in 3 races
Total points: 406.2
Development Index score: 19.34

Arguably Ukraine’s top prospect of either gender, Vitalii Mandzyn has been seen as the coming man for the last couple of highly disrupted years for the country. He made his World Cup debut in 2022-23 but was somewhat out of his depth at that point, but in this, his second junior year, he was much more at home at the level, although the team did move him between levels fairly frequently. He spent December at the IBU Cup where he was consistently in the top 15 before returning to the World Cup at Oberhof. Traditionally something of a baptism of fire, he actually adapted well to Oberhof, scoring all of his points there with a PB of 31st in the sprint. This is probably due to his ski speed needing work as in the more forgiving range of Ruhpolding where more athletes were shooting well he was outside the points, but he did still qualify for the pursuit. He then did a tour of championships, doing the Europeans, the Junior Europeans, and the Junior Worlds in quick succession, getting a silver from the middle one in the MS60 and a silver in the latter in the relay where he anchored the team home, passing the fancied French team for the medal after Jacques Jefferies’ late penalty, as well as securing two fourth places, in the MS60 at the Junior Euros and the Individual at the Junior Worlds. He’s not the finished article yet, but he’ll be among the favourites should the Ukrainians deploy him at the Junior Worlds next season again, and his progress at the World Cup level suggests he’s heading in the right direction.

#9: Valentin Lejeune (FRA)

29/12/2002 (U22)
World Cup: 0 points in 1 race
European Championships: 49 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 256 points in 13 races
Junior World Championships: 118 points in 3 races
Total points: 396.6
Development Index score: 19.83

The top-scoring French prospect in the junior ranks is Lejeune, who in his final Junior year spent most of the season at the IBU Cup, though he did earn himself a World Cup debut in Antholz. He actually has a slightly worse IBU Cup PPR than Levet (19.69 against 21.30) but this was countered by a far superior set of European Championship performances, thanks to top 20s in the sprint and pursuit. However, it is worth noting that he only made a single trip to the flower ceremony at the IBU Cup, so he is possibly a bit fortunate to have earned that single run-out in the World Cup, largely precipitated by others taking time out preparing for Nové Město. He did, however, score a silver medal in the Individual and a 6th place in the Sprint at the Junior World Championships, though given both of these were on perfect shooting, he may need to work on his ski speed to be able to make the next step up, and how well he can do this will ascertain whether he projects to be more like Aristide Bègue or Antonin Guigonnat going forward as those are the two comparables I see for him.

#8: Elia Zeni (ITA)

05/06/2001 (U23)
World Championships: 0 points in 1 race
World Cup: 64 points in 17 races
Total points: 370
Development Index score: 20.56

Zeni to some extent had a similar season to Jonáš Mareček, spending the whole season at the World Cup with several races in the 35th-50th kind of range – likewise 7 results in the 40s. However, his PPR is nearly double (approaching 4), and three results in the top 30 push his score up, one in Ruhpolding and then two as part of an excellent finish to the season, in Soldier Hollow and Canmore. He had almost as many results in the points as outside and a good jump up from last year’s results which were largely at the Junior Cup and IBU Cup and would have been good for a score of 11.26. For the moment he’s very much the makeweight in the team, with the Italian team’s youth movement largely led by Giacomel and Bionaz who are a year older and have aged out of the U23 ranks as a result, and his role is largely to not mess up in the relay and hold the team at a decent level; usually on leadoff duty, which he’s largely done pretty well at. He may never be anything more than a role player at the World Cup level but you could do far worse than him in that role for sure.

#7: Sivert Gerhardsen (NOR)

21/07/2004 (U20)
Junior World Championships: 172 points in 3 races
Total points: 103.2
Development Index score: 20.64

The last of our hard-to-categorise junior-age Norwegians who rock up for the championships only, Gerhardsen gets the highest scores thanks to 3 top 10s including a win in the MS60 at the Junior level. Not bad considering he’s a year one junior. The only other IBU-sanctioned racing he’s done has been at last year’s Junior Worlds where he got a complete set of medals in the Youth categories, again with the gold medal being in the pursuit, the only H2H race on the program there, which tells you that, like the senior team whose podium lockouts tend to be confined to pursuits and mass starts, he seems to be more adept at head to head racing than many of his contemporaries. Shooting 20/20 in such circumstances as a teenager is a promising sign indeed, but unfortunately we don’t have too much else to go on outside of the domestic competitions. He would have scored 13.5 from his Junior World Championships performances from last year, with the same restriction on number of races as this year, so there is progress moving from youths to juniors which is encouraging – except for those hoping for an end to the Norwegian domination who eye this terrifyingly strong production line with concern.

#6: Lovro Planko (SLO)

28/05/2001 (U23)
World Championships: 19 points in 3 races
World Cup: 108 points in 15 races
Total points: 689
Development Index score: 38.28

While a lot of attention has been paid to the Slovene young women coming through (Repinc in particular), on the men’s side Lovro Planko has made some significant progress as the team looks to an impending era with neither Fak nor Bauer, who carried their team for most of the last 15 years. Alex Cisar (who has now aged out of this anyway) barely raced this year so the mantle fell to Planko to give hope for the future and I’d say he achieved that; he had a solid 2022-23 split across multiple races and settled in to a World Cup berth this season; last year his World Cup PPR was 1.42, this year he improved that to 7.2 while matching his World Championships performances. He’s become a regular in the minor points – showing the level above the likes of Zeni and Mareček with no fewer than 10 results between 30th and 40th place, but it’s that clean-shooting 9th place in Lenzerheide that most stands out, showing that he does have the potential to step forward and score some much bigger points. He had a dreadful January before recovering somewhat at Nové Město and the final trimester – but then Cisar had a good 2022-23 and was nowhere this season so Planko will be wary of following in those footsteps.

#5: Martin Uldal (NOR)

23/05/2001 (U23)
European Championships: 128 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 852 points in 18 races
Total points: 1019.6
Development Index score: 48.55

Here we have the first of Norway’s IBU Cup wrecking crew; the men’s IBU Cup has been even more of a Norway-fest than the World Cup, thanks to their insane overspill of talent. Surely if they were from pretty much any country, any one of Johan-Olav Botn, Mats Øverby, Martin Uldal, Martin Nevland and Isak Frey would be on the World Cup, but instead they’re forced to ply their trade at the second tier, which has resulted in highly one-sided races especially once the likes of Philipp Horn and Danilo Riethmüller earned promotions – no fewer than TWELVE races between the IBU Cup and the European Championships have seen a Norwegian podium lockout, with 2 of those being a 1-2-3-4, three being a 1-2-3-4-5, and one even being a 1-2-3-4-5-6. Uldal has been one of the quieter members of the wrecking crew, with “just” two wins and seven podiums, but he has still got a stunning 47.33 PPR at the IBU Cup level meaning he averages a top 5. Some uneven shooting and an awful week at altitude in Martell bring his average down a little, and that he finished 4th on the IBU Cup as a result means he’s probably going to be stuck at this level for another year now simply because others will be ahead in line for promotion – and there’s already not enough room at the top with both Sørum and Botn in addition to the 6 regular World Cup starters. He has, however, probably reached the ceiling of what he can at the IBU Cup, as last year would have earned a score of 51.11 so he’s essentially being forced to stagnate by the lack of opportunity to move up.

#4: Martin Nevland (NOR)

16/06/2001 (U23)
European Championships: 121 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 916 points in 19 races
Total points: 1075.2
Development Index score: 48.87

Nevland is much like Uldal, but slightly stronger, with a PPR of 48.21 to Uldal’s 47.33 and finishing 3rd in the IBU Cup overall so he is likely to be – just – ahead in the scramble for places. He also, unlike Uldal, has the benefit of upward momentum, having had a PPR of 36.57 last season so improving his scores year on year. He also seems to have slightly more faith from the team brass in respect of team races, although he only entered two SMRs this season and no Mixed Relays; that’s still more than Uldal’s none, however. He did, on the other hand, only score the one victory – an MS60 on home snow in Sjusjøen back in December – along with six podiums, and was often the one sat in the flowers when the team did one of those 1-2-3-4/-5/-6 results. On the flip side of things, Nevland’s floor is extremely high; apart from an anomalous 50th place in the Short Individual at Obertilliach (and given he DNSed the ensuing sprint, this suggests he may have been ill or crashed), he was never, not once, outside the top 15 all season – and only twice outside the top 10. That’s right, from 22 races this season across the IBU Cup and European Championships, Martin Nevland was in the top 10 on 18 occasions. So while he may not be the guy that is going to swashbuckle to victory left right and centre, he would at least likely make the kind of Franziska Hildebrand, Andrea Henkel, Evgeny Ustyugov type – just somebody who is metronomically scoring points and taking results pressure off of his teammates. Not that there’s really much results pressure for the Norwegian men in any respect other than knowing there’s always somebody highly capable ready to take your place, of course.

#3: Isak Frey (NOR)

28/08/2003 (U21)
European Championships: 195 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 727 points in 13 races
Junior World Championships: 215 points in 3 races
Total points: 1101
Development Index score: 57.95

The top Norwegian prospect, and when you consider all of the ground that covers, it tells you how good this guy is. He’s vaulted over not only all the 2002 athletes and his contemporaries, but many of the 2001 guys too – ahead of Trym Gerhardsen, Einar Hedegart, Johannes Willassen, both Alm brothers, and many of the veterans who are far from old – Vetle Rype Paulsen, Jørgen Sæter, Simon Kirkeeide… in all honesty I think he belongs above Nevland, Øverby and Uldal, but his youth meaning he can be deployed elsewhere than just the World and IBU Cup means he may be forced to wait in line. He was only 5th overall in the IBU Cup, but crucially this was from 13 races to Nevland’s 19 and Uldal’s 18, for a superior PPR of 55.92, plus when the results had something on the line he also raised his game, with 5-3-1 his results at the European Championships, and delivering when expected to at the Junior World Championships, going 4-1-2 there as well. He had two wins at the IBU Cup, one at the European Championships as mentioned, five podiums and five flower ceremonies – yes, 13 out of 16 races he was in the flowers. His worst result of the entire year was 8th. He’s two years younger than Uldal and Nevland, three younger than Øverby and four younger than Botn, and is already competing at a comparable level, being able to ski among the very best on the IBU Cup and when he hits targets he’s going to at least podium. He ought to be on the World Cup before long – the only problem is, as I’ve said with many athletes on this countdown already… he’s Norwegian, so he needs somebody to perform badly enough to allow the door to open, and he’s got to wait his place in the queue and hope that the team look at things like PPR and upward momentum, not just hard points totals at the IBU Cup. And nobody seems to be performing badly enough to even make that a question anyway.

#2: Campbell Wright (USA)

25/05/2002 (U22)
World Championships: 103 points in 4 races
World Cup: 216 points in 13 races
Total points: 1728
Development Index score: 101.65

Campbell Wright was already a highly vaunted prospect while he was competing for New Zealand, but he has kicked on a level since being fully integrated into the US team and being able to benefit from full support rather than just collaboration with the team. The tendency to replenish their ranks through the NCAA skiing competitions means the Americans tend to see their athletes break through at older ages, with the likes of Dunklee, Irwin and Egan already being in their 30s when they started to hit the front sheet of the results page, and it’s a strange situation where their best younger athletes are Germain – born in the US but raised in France – and Wright who was born and raised in New Zealand. However, Wright is also a can’t miss kind of talent and getting him to represent them early on is a coup. His score for last season was 29.62 but this season he exploded to scoring regular top 20s especially in the latter season. His overall World Cup standing doesn’t really show it because he missed much of December sick, but his PPR jumped up from 5 in 2022-23 to 16.62 this season, suggesting an average finish of ~24th on the World Cup; last year while racing for New Zealand the Junior World Championships were a target but now with the US team he focused on the outright World Championships because, despite being still eligible for the YJWCH, he’s clearly their best talent, and he repaid them with four top 20s there, and then a super final trimester where he twice set PBs, with his first top 10 in Oslo, and then his first flower ceremony on “home” snow in Soldier Hollow. His aim for next year is surely to hit the podium.

#1: Éric Perrot (FRA)

29/06/2001 (U23)
World Championships: 143 point in 4 races
World Cup: 622 points in 21 races
Total points: 4028
Development Index score: 161.12

All too obviously the best U23 in the world right now, Eric Perrot has essentially graduated beyond being a development athlete, and his score only continued to grow exponentially further above anybody else with a super final trimester capped by that maiden World Cup win in Soldier Hollow and a further podium in Canmore. 12 of his 25 top level races this season resulted in top 10 finishes, three of which were at the World Championships, and he only missed the points once, that being a 45th-placed finish in the Oberhof sprint where he missed four targets. He ended up finishing 11th on the overall World Cup and essentially managed the same kind of performance emerging out of his first post-junior year this season as was managed in 2022-23 by Niklas Hartweg (whose season would have netted a score of 162.73). It was fairly predictable in fairness – even as a final year junior Perrot’s 2022-23 season scored 69.42 which was the third best behind two athletes who are now too old for U23 (Hartweg and Giacomel) and he improved his World Cup PPR from 15.75 to 29.62 which suggests an average finish of ~12th. There’s not much left for Perrot to do than keep doing what he’s doing, he’s the clear best in his age group and any even incremental improvements should see him become a regular in the flower ceremonies and podiums.

Takeaways

As much as the women’s countdown was dominated by the Germans and the French, there’s one inescapable conclusion from the top 30 prospects on the men’s side of the sport: anybody hoping for a swift end to the current era of absolute Norwegian domination is likely to be sorely disappointed. They only have 6 athletes in the countdown, but they’re all in the top 20 and three of them are in the top 5. And that’s with three of them – Alm, Kalkenberg and Gerhardsen – having their points affected by the lack of international racing as well.

The other thing that is clear to note is the difference between the way the points are distributed for the men and the women; the score required for Voldiya Galmace Paulin to achieve 30th place on the womens’ countdown would place her 18th on the mens’ list, while the score achieved by Legović for 30th rank here would have placed him just 42nd on the womens’. There is a clear three-step scoring system among the men whereas the women’s scores gradually step up throughout the countdown; there are the established World Cup names at the top (Perrot and Wright), then a clear jump down to the IBU Cup-dominating Norwegians with Planko also joining that group, then a clear step back to everybody else. The extent of the Norwegian domination of the IBU Cup is likely the largest reason for those divides; that scoring range from 20-35 among the women was filled with athletes who were competitive on the IBU Cup and scored some podiums or wins here and there – people like Randby, Bondoux, Schumann and Andexer – whereas on the mens’ IBU Cup, the podiums and even flower ceremonies were frequently locked out by the Norwegians, meaning the equivalent level athletes – the likes of Lejeune, Levet and Guiraud Poillot – were settling for scraps in the lower top 10 and top 20.

Another point of interest is the difference between the German men and women. Not one German man makes the top 10 here, and only three make the top 30 at all – all from the 2003 generation. Benjamin Menz’s score from 2022-23 would have had him at the bottom end of the top 10, but he regressed badly this season, while other hotly-tipped prospects like Albert Engelmann didn’t compete internationally. The Swedes also have some cause for concern about the pipeline – more so than among the women, in fact – as their only entrant in the top 30 is fairly far down and ageing out as well. Oscar Andersson scored 18 PPR in the junior ranks and Martin Höiby 23 PPR in the youth ranks at Otepää so not all is lost, but as with the women, the decision to follow the Norwegians’ lead and compete at home only outside of the championships at the junior level may have backfired.

Some of the bigger youth-age prospects just missed out on the top 30 – Jakub Kulbin of Estonia for example, while in the U20 ranks Jakub Borgula of Slovakia also was just outside; Kulbin would have slotted in at #28 had he not made his World Cup debut this season, but that this looks to be a year or two too soon for him did provide a bit of perspective.

Posted in Biathlon News, Statistical analysis | Tagged junior, results

Junior + U23 Development Index – Women

Posted on 2024-03-29 | by Zunzunegui | Leave a Comment on Junior + U23 Development Index – Women

Looking at developing talent is an inexact science, and always has been. Athletes develop at different speeds, have different bumps in the road, have different opportunities. For example, Tora Berger and Magdalena Neuner are both rightly seen as legends of the sport, but had Berger retired at the same age Neuner did, she’d have never won a World Cup race. With young prospects spread across multiple levels of international competition and in some cases never facing off with each other head to head, it is often difficult to compare exactly where on their development path an athlete is. The only multi-tier scoring system I had available to refer to initially was the internal rankings put out by the Russian Biathlon Union, who used to include points awarded for results at the World Cup, IBU Cup, IBU Junior Cup and the domestic Russian Cup. Obviously with the team barred from international competitions that points system has been somewhat redundant the last two years, but it also drastically overvalued lower tier competitions, ranking a victory at the IBU Cup as equivalent to finishing 8th on the World Cup. I wanted to avoid this kind of overvaluing of lower tiers, because ultimately, results at the World Cup should hold more weight since that’s the pinnacle of the sport. I was also wary of unfairly penalising an athlete coming from a nation less deep in talent for scoring less at the World Cup relative to athletes of similar talent who are scoring strong results at the IBU Cup. The same goes for the IBU Cup and the IBU Junior Cup – as we saw when Anna Andexer, somebody capable of hitting the top 10 on the IBU Cup, returned to Junior-level competition and won races by minutes.

The most important thing, however, was that a system be able to apply to all athletes competing across all levels. The system I came up with is far from perfect, but I felt it gave me a mostly fair way to compare talent across the levels. The IBU’s points system would be applied to all races, but on top of that, at the World Cup and IBU Cup levels, a bonus point would be awarded to all positions in the top 60 – I felt it highly unfair to only use a points-based system and then rate 40th place at the Junior Cup higher than 41st place at the World Cup. This rule, however, would only apply to Sprints and Individuals, since in any Pursuit, Mass Start or Mass Start 60, an athlete will be in the top 60 just by starting. I also decided to study U23 as this level is similar to that used in other endurance-based sports like cross-country skiing, cycling and rowing. I felt that extending to U25 as IBU do was unnecessary – you don’t need me to tell you people like Elvira Öberg and Tommaso Giacomel are good at biathlon, you can just look at the World Cup standings for that. But U23 athletes no longer have the junior competitions available to them and have to sink or swim in senior competition – and whether they can adjust to that is a key point in their development.

I also, unfortunately, had to exclude relays from the results – the range of factors applicable for them based on where an athlete is in the relay, the team they’re entering as part of, the performances of others, just make them too unreliable for a fair comparison.

How it works

  • World Cup points are valued at 5x IBU Cup points. This includes the bonus point for positions 41-60, and makes IBU Cup podiums equivalent to finishing 25th-30th at the World Cup level.
  • World Championship results are valued at 20% higher than World Cup points.
  • European Championship results are valued at 20% higher than IBU Cup points.
  • IBU Junior Cup points are valued at 0.2x IBU Cup points.
  • Junior World Championships are valued at 0.6x IBU Cup points at the Junior level and 0.3x for the Youth level
  • Other races with restricted start lists such as the Youth Olympics, European Youth Olympic Festival, Asian Winter Games or Universiade are scored at 0.1x IBU Cup points.

Once all points are tallied up, this is divided by the number of races entered (minimum 5) to arrive at a development score. The reason for the 5 race minimum is that athletes who race fewer events than this will have a greater degree of uncertainty as to whether their performance is sustainable, and also these are often national calendar athletes who enter championship races with higher points tallies and can see their results fluctuate much more heavily due to a single good or bad race. Therefore any athletes completing fewer than 5 IBU-sanctioned competitions in the season will see their total score divided by 5.

The system does have weaknesses, of course. No points are given for positions below 60th on the World Cup, while lower tier competition comes with a maximum score achievable; as a result, for example, Julia Kink actually saw her score reduced by her time on the World Cup due to races outside the points, while Anna Andexer’s score was actually reduced by continuing to race at the Junior Cup because her IBU Cup performances, if taken in isolation, resulted in a score higher than the maximum she could achieve at the Junior World Cup even by winning every race. In fact, the kind of time margins Andexer was winning by at the Junior World Cup was a large part of my consideration when looking at how to value results at that level on the scale.

However, as in order to produce a score, all an athlete required was to have achieved a top 60 at the World Cup, World Championships or IBU Cup, or a top 40 at a Junior Cup or Championship race, and all athletes could be scored on the same system. The bigger gaps come the higher up the ranks you go – but that is also by design because these are the athletes whose abilities we are able to ascertain with a greater degree of certainty. And it is entirely results-driven, removing interpretation; shooting %, range time and ski speed are only important to the score inasmuch as they drive an athlete’s results, and so where one or more of these has factored considerably into an athlete’s performance due to their particular skillset, I’ve commented on that.

While I’ve laid out the results as a top 30, it is important to note that this is less an indication of athletes’ perceived talent level as much as it is an indication of athletes’ relative World Cup readiness. The higher the score, the more competitive the athlete would be expected to be at the top level, and therefore a younger athlete (or one that is newer to biathlon, for those that convert from other sports) may be a stronger prospect than somebody rating higher than them here, but have more years of anticipated development and improvement to make ahead of reaching their peak. This was originally posted up on the forum, but has been revised as more of an editorial here.

First up, let’s look at the women who will be looking to make their marks in world biathlon in the coming years.

#30: Voldiya Galmace Paulin (FRA)

21/10/2005 (U19)
Youth World Championships: 169 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 215 points in 4 races
Total points: 93.7
Development Index score: 13.39

First up we have one of France’s biggest prospects, and their best U19 athlete this season. She largely raced domestically this season (winning her age group in the Coupe de France and scoring a few podiums even among the full competition) but started the season with a few Junior World Cup races where she was always in the flowers, and ended it with going 3-2-8 in the Youth races at the World Championships. France has a serious production line of talent and while there may be several that have flattered to deceive once performing at a higher level, or that have been lost along the way (Lena Arnaud’s early retirement still rankles), Galmace Paulin is one that we have had limited sightings of internationally but from what we have been able to see, looks to have all the tools she needs to adapt to the step from Youths to Juniors well next season. I’d anticipate a fuller Junior Cup calendar at least and, based on the French team’s habits of the last few seasons, maybe some IBU Cup starts in the second half if she continues to progress.

#29: Lara Wagner (AUT)

26/4/2002 (U22)
European Championships: 36 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 182 points in 13 races
Junior World Championships: 67 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 230 points in 5 races
Total points: 321.4
Development Index score: 13.39

I’ll be honest, I expected Wagner’s score to come out a bit higher than this, I think this was as she had a few results that had stuck out in my memory – the sprint win at the Junior Euros in Jakuszyce and being part of the Mixed Relay bronze at the Junior World Championships the most prominent – and possibly because of a bit of light humour at the fact you had both Schumann and Wagner competing against each other at that level. Although she was pretty successful in her few Junior World Cup run-outs, she spent more time at the IBU Cup. She didn’t manage any top 10s at that level but she did score 3 top 20s there as well as one at the European Championships which shows she has a pretty good ceiling, but she was somewhat overshadowed by Andexer to whom she played second fiddle. Shooting in a busy range appears to be a problem she needs to work on if she wants to carve out a niche now she’s leaving juniors – there were three H2H races where she shot 13/20 and one where she shot 9/20 this season, and so that’s a key area of developing; for inclusivity purposes there are fewer pursuits and mass starts at the lower levels so it’s something she’ll have to tidy up if she’s ever to be a viable starter at the World Cup level.

#28: Alma Siegismund (GER)

03/9/2005 (U19)
Youth World Championships: 180 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 206 points in 4 races
Total points: 95.2
Development Index score: 13.60

Germany’s second best U19 athlete may be a distant, distant second at this point in time, but she’s still had a pretty good season at the level she’s competing at, only racing at the Junior Cup and the Youth World Championships, but with an average finishing position of circa 4th on the former and 3rd at the latter – pretty impressive stuff. And it’s not hard to see where her skill is – she has hit 85/90 targets in individual races this season, and 30/36 in relays to boot – a 91.3% hit rate which is downright phenomenal at the junior level. She has been top 10 of every race she’s entered internationally this season, with only one race missing the flowers, but only the one win, in the Youth World Championship Individual. She’ll be a first year junior next season, but with a number of not-yet-too-old competitors ready to come back and many still-developing athletes battling for spots in the German team, she may need to hit the ground running at the IBU Cup level to be able to progress.

#27: Lena Repinc (SLO)

08/04/2003 (U21)
World Championships: 11 points in 3 races
World Cup: 7 points in 9 races
European Championships: 39 points in 2 races
Junior World Championships: 113 points in 3 races
Total points: 231.6
Development Index score: 13.62

Lena has felt like the coming woman for Slovenia for a while, but this year was a challenging one for her, and at one point losing huge swathes of time despite clean shooting in a relay suggested that it was becoming more of an “if” than a “when” for her. The season had started promisingly with her first World Cup points in the Individual at Östersund, but at the World Cup at least, unfortunately that was as good as it got. She did get some decent results in the European Championships, but her crowning glory was hitting all 10 targets to finish 30th in the sprint at the World Championships, showing that hope should not be abandoned yet even though her score has gone backwards (last year’s results – mainly at the Junior Cup and IBU Cup – would have netted 17.79). And against the Junior World Championships field she was still highly prominent, and won a bronze medal in the Individual too. Given how small she is – she’s not particularly tall and is thin enough to make Delphine Claudel look like Marit Bjørgen – certainly staying healthy enough to capitalise on her talent might be one of her biggest challenges. In terms of her physical talent I’d rank her higher than this, but the results just aren’t coming together for her yet, and I worry that they may never.

#26: Sara Scattolo (ITA)

27/03/2003 (U21)
World Cup: 0 points in 1 race
European Championships: 0 points in 2 races
IBU Cup: 305 points in 16 races
Junior World Championships: 46 points in 3 races
Total points: 343.6
Development Index score: 15.62

I’m going to be blunt: I think Scattolo is better than this. She nearly won the Junior Cup outright despite entering the Youth Worlds that don’t score points rather than the Junior Worlds that do in 2021-22, and she graduated up to the IBU Cup mid-season last year, so there were high hopes this season. In terms of raw skillset she’s probably the best U22 the Italians have, but she couldn’t seem to put it all together often enough this season. When she did, she showed that she was legitimately a great talent, scoring two individual podiums (both in sprints, at Ridnaun and Arber) and one in an SMR when paired with Daniele Cappellari. However, she followed that Arber podium with a 56th place the following day, and that podium came directly off the back of finishing 70th and 80th in two races at the European Championships, which tell you the main problem: she can’t find consistency just yet. Likewise at the Junior World Championships she had a decent Individual, a very mediocre sprint and MS60, but then a great relay leg that saw her staying with the likes of Tannheimer and Bertrand and dropping the likes of Randby. She’s a rollercoaster, but if she can sort out the consistency in her final junior year then she’ll be a very dangerous athlete indeed. She will also have staying ahead of her younger sister Ilaria as an additional motivation, of course.

#25: Martina Trabucchi (ITA)

06/07/2002 (U22)
European Championships: 0 points in 2 races
IBU Cup: 297 points in 18 races
Junior World Championships: 100 points in 3 races
Total points: 369
Development Index score: 16.04

Big sister Beatrice might have hit some surprising World Cup heights at the end of the season, but her younger sister has been making waves on the development circuit, scoring a creditable if not spectacular 16.5 PPR on the IBU Cup in her final junior year. She was actually slightly below Scattolo in that respect (19.06 PPR) but the difference between them was largely fuelled by Trabucchi’s superior performances in Otepää, finishing 4th in the Individual and then finishing top 20 in the other two races among the Junior field. She only scored three top 10s at the IBU Cup, two of which were in 10th place (the other being a 6th) which is probably why Scattolo got the taste of World Cup action instead of her; while Trabucchi’s overall results are slightly ahead the fact she’s also a year older means you suspect the team views Sara as the bigger talent, so Martina will likely have to persuade the team through solid results and strong shooting and follow in her sister’s footsteps if she’s to make the World Cup, especially seeing as Italy already have a solid bank of ex-junior prospects developing in their World Cup team.

#24: Noémie Remonnay (FRA)

05/04/2001 (U23)
European Championships: 0 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 231 points in 12 races
Total points: 241
Development Index score: 16.07

An interesting selection at the IBU Cup, Remonnay appeared to have stalled out, not getting to race internationally at all in her final junior year – only to resurface this season on the IBU Cup in January after earning promotion with good results on the Coupe de France in December. Upon promotion she promptly scored a top 10 in her first race weekend of the season in international competition and looked to be establishing herself at the level, although finishing outside the top 40 in all three races at the European Championships will have been a disappointment. She bounced back with a PB with 4th at Arber, but with an average of just under 20 PPR meaning an average position just outside the top 20 at the IBU Cup level, she is in danger of being traded in for a younger model if the team decides they want to see what Galmace Paulin, Jeannier, Dupont Ballet-Baz or Siberchicot can do with a more extensive senior calendar next season.

#23: Maya Cloetens (BEL)

08/01/2002 (U22)
World Championships: 8 points in 3 races
World Cup: 0 points in 6 races
IBU Cup: 190 points in 8 races
Junior World Championships: 115 points in 3 races
Total points: 326
Development Index score: 16.30

I was quite surprised to see Maya down here in all honesty, as another part of that vaunted French ’02 generation. However, the move to Belgium may have got her better opportunities sooner, but it also came at the expense of the support and funding that the French team has to offer. Nevertheless, while she was unable to score points at the World Cup, she could make the top 40 in the World Championships and achieved a respectable PPR of 23.75 at the IBU Cup level. She may have won no medals, but a top 10 in every individual race at the Junior World Championships tells us she’s still a rising star, but she’s being outshone by her French contemporaries and it maybe suggests that the move to Belgium may have been as much about not getting lost in the shuffle as anything else, especially as a January ’02 birth made her one of the oldest competitors in the junior field? Nevertheless, she’s solid and established on the World Cup now, even if the resource difference between the Belgians and the French may put a cap on what she is able to achieve – she may top out at being a female equivalent to Florent Claude in that respect, but that’s a pretty good niche to have.

#22: Fany Bertrand (FRA)

02/01/2002 (U22)
Junior World Championships: 105 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 195 points in 3 races
Total points: 102
Development Index score: 17.00

Three consecutive French-born athletes, Bertrand had a somewhat challenging season, that saw her regress somewhat, though largely not through fault of her own except inasmuch as her pre-season selection race performances cost her; her development index score for 2022-23 was 22.30, built largely out of her 12 IBU Cup races that season, which reduced down to zero this year. She started the season on the Junior World Cup, but this was rather too easy for her, scoring 3rd, 1st and 5th in three individual races before withdrawing; being born on the 2nd January 2002 makes her pretty much the oldest of all juniors and with so many top juniors on the women’s side having already graduated the Junior Cup she had nothing left to prove at that level. At the Junior Worlds her ski speed held her back in the Individual , she had a passable sprint but capped it off with an excellent medal-winning performance in the MS60 and a super 10/10 relay performance. There’s still potential in there, but when you’re in the same age group as such talents as Richard and Michelon there’s always the danger that you wind up being the Annika Knoll to their Laura Dahlmeier and Franziska Preuß – still able to make the World Cup but in a limited role and overshadowed by more illustrious contemporaries.

#21: Tuva Aas Stræte (NOR)

25/03/2001 (U23)
IBU Cup: 131 points in 8 races
Total points: 136
Development Index score: 17.00

Possibly a victim of the numbers game in Norway, Stræte scored medals at the Junior Worlds in 2022-23 but entered just one trimester at the IBU Cup as part of the rotation in the team. Her season this year was similar, doing just the first trimester after earning a spot in the squad in Sjusjøen, but without the prospect of returning for the YJWCH after being rotated out in January as Lien and Dokken returned to the circuit. It certainly wasn’t that she did badly, since she scored 3 top 20s and only missed the top 30 once, but it wasn’t a significant amount of progress (last season’s IBU Cup PPR was 14.57, this year 16.38) and with more experienced journeywomen like Kalkenberg, Erdal and Enodd holding down spots, she was unable to wrestle a spot back into the team after New Year. The pressures of needing form in November to earn spots in as deep a team as the Norwegians may have had an impact, and she will likely need to prove she’s not a Decemberist to be able to progress further.

#20: Pascale Paradis (CAN)

04/03/2002 (U22)
IBU Cup: 149 points in 8 races
Total points: 154
Development Index score: 19.25

Canada’s top prospect is one of the hardest to pin down. She tends to dominate on ski speed domestically but is a step off being reasonably able to progress to the World Cup on her IBU Cup pace. The bigger problem is that, as an attendee of the University of Alaska, she calls her biathlon season to a halt after New Year and races cross-country on the NCAA circuit, meaning we have only ever seen her internationally at Junior World Championships and for a few IBU Cup December races. A few North American talents tend therefore to appear as late bloomers, but it depends how much rifle training she can get in in that time whether she can continue to progress or whether she may go a similar way to, say, Megan Bankes who starred as a junior but was unable to make the step up in the Canadian team.

#19: Marlene Fichtner (GER)

16/03/2003 (U21)
European Championships: 96 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 100 points in 5 races
Junior World Championships: 81 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 166 points in 4 races
Total points: 303
Development Index score: 20.20

In the strong junior ranks of the German women, 2003 seems like a comparatively weak year, at least compared to 2002 with Puff and Schumann and 2004 with Kink and Grotian. Fichtner is comfortably the pick of that year’s prospects, however, and although she’s some way from the front of the queue for World Cup progression with the depth of the German team, she’s definitely earned herself an IBU Cup role going forward. She started the season at the Junior Cup more just because of the number of prospects needing a spot than anything else, but with over 40 PPR at that level she showed she deserved to step up. With available places due to the likes of Weidel and Kebinger calling their seasons early, she got to step up into the European Championships where she adapted extremely well, with a best of 5th in the Pursuit, and going at 20 PPR on the IBU Cup from then on. At the Junior Worlds she was one of the elder German entrants, and was solid but unspectacular, with a best of 7th in the Sprint, but she did anchor home the gold medal relay, serving as the final leg in that kind of management role that Vetle Sjåstad Christiansen does for Norway. She doesn’t seem to have any glaring weaknesses, but she also needs to prove that she has a high enough ceiling to promote given the logjam for promotion among the German junior women right now.

#18: Julia Kink (GER)

26/01/2004 (U20)
World Cup: 3 points in 4 races
European Championships: 5 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 395 points in 15 races
Junior World Championships: 165 points in 3 races
Total points: 536
Development Index score: 21.44

Kink is one of those athletes that my system struggles most with, unfortunately. That brief sojourn on the World Cup in North America actually wound up reducing her score, because her best performance netted no points, being as it was in a relay, and the fact she qualified for the pursuit but did not score points in either race in Canmore reduces her overall PPR because they become the equivalent of a low points-scoring IBU Cup race – which is something she had very few of when she was actually racing on the IBU Cup. She’s also, results-wise, below some athletes I think she’s a bigger prospect than, with her ski speed and relative youth as a year 1 junior. She started the season very well, but strangely went through a less competitive patch straight after her biggest result, that being the Individual win in Martell-Val Martello in January, dropping her in the IBU Cup overall standings. However, she then targeted the Junior World Championships and showed very well there, winning the MS60 in a close battle with Ema Kapustová and being a key part of the gold medal-winning relay as well, and while she may have only earned a World Cup berth because of Franzi Preuß being sick, she was decently competitive and even scored some points in Soldier Hollow alongside that memorable emergency appearance in the relay. She has two more junior years ahead of her but I doubt she sees the Junior Cup again.

#17: Valentina Dimitrova (BUL)

03/08/2003 (U21)
World Championships: 7 points in 2 races
World Cup: 54 points in 12 races
European Championships: 0 points in 1 race
Junior World Championships: 108 points in 3 races
Total points: 401.8
Development Index score: 22.32

Dimitrova has become a favourite of mine this season and one of the athletes I was most keen to see how she shook out on the points scale – the Bulgarian team’s comparative lack of depth means that those athletes who looked like such promising youths back at the Soldier Hollow Junior Worlds were competing at the World Cup well before their contemporaries, however it is pleasing to see this year that both Dimitrova and Hristova (34th on 11.44) have made progress and been able to get some solid scores at the World Cup level. Last year Hristova was the more consistent but Dimitrova had the higher potential ceiling and has delivered on that in 2023-24. Valentina’s best scores all came in the early season – scoring three top 30s on the World Cup across Östersund and Hochfilzen – but she also has been between 40th and 60th several times and it’s worth noting that as a year 2 junior there’s still two years of eligibility here. Against the Junior field in Otepää she had an anonymous Individual but fought back with a bronze medal in the sprint, with ski speed that would put her ahead of a number of well-reputed juniors like Fichtner, Randby, Cloetens, Repinc and Kapustová. She’s still eligible next season and given the smaller size and budget of the Bulgarian team I’d expect a similar calendar for her next season in her final junior year, but hopefully more World Cup points as she continues to progress.

#16: Lea Rothschopf (AUT)

31/12/2001 (U23)
World Championships: 4 points in 1 race
World Cup: 29 points in 5 races
European Championships: 52 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 346 points in 15 races
Total points: 609.4
Development Index score: 25.39

In her first post-junior year, Rothschopf made some solid progress. Last season’s results would have got her a score of 11.97 so you can see she’s headed in the right direction; now no longer eligible for the Junior Cup she started off the season scraping into the points in the IBU Cup, but as the season went on she grew in confidence, gradually improving results until she was hitting the flower ceremony in Ridnaun and Martell, before scoring her first podium at the level in the Sprint at Arber. Here she also beat World Cup veterans Dunja Zdouc and Julia Schwaiger to earn herself a start in the World Championships to allow rotation of the team’s top names, followed by World Cup debut for the final trimester. This started off extremely well, with a creditable 37th in Nové Město’s Individual, then 24th place on World Cup debut in the same format at Oslo. She would then struggle to score points for the rest of the season, but still remained within the competitive 41st-60th area until scoring 29th in the Pursuit at Canmore, her last race of the season. The issue for her will be proving that she’s appreciably better than many of the other World Cup/IBU Cup tweener level athletes the Austrians have so that she can get an extended run in the team before the likes of Andexer arrive on the scene.

#15: Ema Kapustová (SVK)

14/12/2002 (U22)
World Cup: 31 points in 7 races
European Championships: 60 points in 1 race
IBU Cup: 72 points in 3 races
Junior World Championships: 176 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 132 points in 3 races
Total points: 449
Development Index score: 26.41

Kapustová has bounced around the levels quite a lot this season, with the team trying to balance her development against the huge void in the team created by the absence of the Fialková sisters this season. She spent the first half of the season at the World Cup, where her results gradually improved from uncompetitive at Östersund through to starting to score points by Lenzerheide. Her best World Cup performance was 25th at the Oberhof pursuit, but perhaps more memorable was her one and only start at the European Championships on home snow at Osrblie – hitting 20/20 she took a bronze medal. Strangely, though, she was then sent to the Junior Euros and then onto the Junior World Championships, before finishing the season at the IBU Cup to save on travel. She got two silver medals at the Junior Worlds – in the Individual and Mass Start 60 – and topped out at 11th in the IBU Cup but was competitive in all 3 races. Her results were definitely trending in the right direction at the World Cup but unfortunately the calendar she ran – largely a product of the power vacuum in the Slovak women’s team – means it’s hard to get a consistent picture of where her peak ability may lie.

#14: Emily Schumann (GER)

14/11/2002 (U22)
European Championships: 27 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 570 points in 20 races
Total points: 617.4
Development Index score: 26.84

One of the most improved athletes of the year in theory, Schumann wasn’t even on the German team’s radar at the start of last season and has now completed her last year of juniors, but hard work on the national calendar brought her into the IBU Cup squad, and she competed at that level all season after adapting very well, eventually finishing in the top 5 overall. The interesting thing with her is that she has one of the most consistent racing levels throughout the season – she had 23 races across the IBU Cup and European Championships, with 5 top 10s (2 podiums) and 5 races outside the top 25. Everything else was between 11th and 25th place, regular as clockwork. Unfortunately for her some of her worst results were at the Euros, but while that consistency is impressive as it shows she has a high base level, she probably needs a few more podiums and flower ceremonies at that level to justify promotion to the World Cup, which put her behind Kink in the queue for promotion despite a better PPR at the IBU Cup level. Still, she has leapt past all but Puff in her own age group and the few years preceding, so she can take inspiration from the likes of Voigt who similarly vaulted past her contemporaries that had outperformed her in youth biathlon and went on to earn her place at the top table by winning the IBU Cup in her second post-junior year.

#13: Anna Andexer (AUT)

26/01/2003 (U21)
European Championships: 60 points in 2 races
IBU Cup: 319 points in 8 races
Junior World Championships: 110 points in 3 races
Junior World Cup: 718 points in 9 races
Total points: 606.6
Development Index score: 27.57

In all honesty, Andexer probably deserves to be a bit higher than this, but the problem she has faced is that the Austrian team have preferred to deploy her in the Junior Cup and load up on results there. She won that competition outright, and at a canter too, but my points system does limit the maximum you can get from those races and her results at the IBU Cup level showed that she was clearly capable of more; in her 8 individual races on the IBU Cup she scored 5 flower ceremonies (albeit with only one podium) and made top 10s even in the stronger field of the European Championships; and when she returned to the Junior Cup she was literally winning sprints by a minute and a half even on 9/10, so clearly she’s at a higher level than that. No Junior Worlds medals but she was top 10 of all races. The limitations of having spent time at the Junior Cup – even averaging nearly 80 points a race which is just absurd, suggesting she comes 1st or 2nd in almost every race – mean that had she not raced at that level at all this season her score would be 35.62, vaulting her up to #8 on the list, meaning if anything the team’s desire to maximise earnings on the Junior Cup or cautiousness regards her progress probably held her back; she’s ready to probably enter the IBU Cup full-time and potentially do spot duty in the World Cup next year.

#12: Anaëlle Bondoux (FRA)

02/07/2004 (U20)
European Championships: 30 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 627 points in 20 races
Total points: 678
Development Index score: 29.48

Anaëlle Bondoux is, season-long, the fastest skier on the IBU Cup. She obviously will look at the likes of Justine Braisaz-Bouchet for inspiration but at the moment she’s considered too raw a prospect to promote to the World Cup. Plus, of course, when Braisaz-Bouchet broke through, there was not the same production line of World Cup podium talent coming out of the French system that there now is. She was already an extremely fast prospect last season, setting some excellent ski times despite being youth-eligible; the problem for Anaëlle, however, is that she is both inconsistent and slow in the range. She is making noteworthy progress though – last year’s performance would have netted a score of 14.81, so she’s basically doubled her score this season in her first junior year. She has a lot of similarities results-wise to Schumann, but she’s two years younger and, with her very different skillset, has a higher ceiling when she gets the shooting right – as is evidenced because just like Schumann she only has two podiums despite consistent top 20s on the IBU Cup, but unlike the German, both of those podiums are victories and she finished 4th in the overall as a result. She will probably be roadblocked for another year or so by the strength in depth of the French team, unfortunately, who felt it too soon to consider her for the North American World Cup rounds, but she’s definitely one to watch.

#11: Hannah Auchentaller (ITA)

28/03/2001 (U23)
World Cup: 60 points in 12 races
European Championships: 72 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 103 points in 2 races
Total points: 523.4
Development Index score: 30.79

Having been part of the Italian World Championships-winning relay last season and getting some “next Doro” hype, the first post-junior year for Auchentaller was a bit of a rocky path and a mixed bag. Her score has fallen back a bit from 2022-23 (that season netted a score of 38.50) and, unlike many U23s, she doesn’t have the fall-back of no longer being eligible for junior competitions because Hannah didn’t race in either the YJWCH or the Junior Cup last season either. However, at the same time, it looked worse for a long time, with her largely hovering around the Pursuit cut-off throughout December and being demoted to the IBU Cup in January – though good results in Brezno and a win in Arber rebuilt her confidence and, despite not racing through much of February, she came back strong with a final trimester that saw her score a PB in Oslo’s Mass Start and not be far off her previous best in the Individual too. The North American leg saw her slowly revert back to her December form, but that she can get those top 15s and top 20s every so often makes me wonder if she’s more destined for a Federica Sanfilippo kind of role on the team?

#10: Gro Randby (NOR)

17/04/2002 (U22)
IBU Cup: 454 points in 13 races
Junior World Championships: 92 points in 3 races
Total points: 517.2
Development Index score: 32.33

Although overshadowed by her younger compatriot Maren Kirkeeide, Randby is the strongest Norwegian in the 2002 age group; although Maren Brännare-Gran was very close to her at the Junior Worlds, and Randby’s time in Otepää is probably more memorable for the near-catastrophic meltdown in the Mixed Relay when shooting for the win with over a minute’s advantage, Gro is clearly the more established name with a couple of seasons of at least rotation duty on the IBU Cup and clear forward progress too; last season she scored 107 points in 7 races on the IBU, which this season she more than quadrupled in less than double the races although she did sit out for a stint during the European Championships which seemed harsh. Results-wise I’d say she has some of the same positives and negatives I raised with regards to Emily Schumann, but with a slightly higher overall level; like Schumann she only has two podiums all season, but she only has two results outside the top 20 and none outside the points with a PPR of 34.92, equivalent to ~8th place. There is the danger that unless she can demonstrate a bit more ability to win that she might get stuck as a ‘tweener as she moves into her senior years, but reliable but seemingly unspectacular performers working on their ski speed post-juniors have had great success in Norway in recent history.

#9: Rebecca Passler (ITA)

31/08/2001 (U23)
World Championships: 0 points in 1 race
World Cup: 86 points in 13 races
Total points: 465
Development Index score: 33.21

In her youth she seemed like a clone of Lisa Vittozzi. In her adulthood she seems like a clone of Vanessa Voigt. Appearance-wise as well as athletically she’s somewhere between the two as well, tall, brunette and shooting-centric. In her final year of eligibility here, mid-season she seemed to be much higher up, but she had raced comparatively sparingly. In the final part of the season, however, the wheels very much came off and her score plummeted, coming 75th in her only race at the World Championships and then not scoring a single World Cup point across Holmenkollen, Soldier Hollow and Canmore. Considering she started the season with two top 20s at Östersund it’s a bit of a drop-off; she has tailed off compared to last season somewhat where she managed the same number of top 20s but kept scoring all season (her Development Index score for 2022-23 would have been 51.88, suggesting she’s taken a step backwards this season). This is especially notable because, like Auchentaller who had almost the complete opposite season to her, she was only racing at the World and IBU Cup levels already last season.

#8: Sara Andersson (SWE)

13/01/2003 (U21)
World Cup: 74 points in 11 races
European Championships: 38 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 106 points in 2 races
Junior World Championships: 166 points in 3 races
Total points: 650.2
Development Index score: 34.22

Andersson is the one thing I would hold against AT’s judgement of the Swedish women’s season as alarming, as she is most definitely the most exciting prospect in the pipeline (well, considering Tänglander is still far off – and may defect to XC too) for them. And while her year-on-year improvement may pale in comparison to, say, Tannheimer, Puff or Richard, she has still made strides. Her score on the index for 2022-23 would have been 24.96 so she’s still improved it noticeably as she goes from a largely IBU Cup-oriented to a mostly World Cup-oriented calendar. Yes, her World Cup PPR actually reduced, but last year’s was based on a single race so not really statistically significant; likewise her IBU Cup PPR went from 23.71 to 53 based on a small sample size where she showed she was too good for that level in Kontiolahti and swiftly earning promotion to the World Cup at the expense of Stina Nilsson. While it hasn’t all been smooth sailing at the World Cup, she did score points in 6 of 11 races, largely sprints and ensuing pursuits (Ruhpolding disaster notwithstanding), and although she was held out of the World Championships, she capitalised with gold medals in the SMR at the European Championships and the sprint at the Junior World Championships. She ended the season poorly in North America but with Mona Brorsson retiring and Tilda Johansson taking a leave of absence that signs suggest may become permanent, there is a spot at the World Cup and potentially also in the relay, and Sara would look to be the best suited person to fill it, handing her current #6 role to Anna-Karin Heijdenberg.

#7: Julia Tannheimer (GER)

01/08/2005 (U19)
World Cup: 34 points in 2 races
IBU Cup: 481 points in 14 races
Junior World Championships: 195 points in 3 races
Total points: 784
Development Index score: 41.26

Prinzessin Julia might just be Germany’s golden girl. As long as Selina Grotian lets her be, at least.  Otherwise it’s going to be a devastating double act in a few years’ time. Still only 18 despite having been talked up for a good three years now as the future of German biathlon, Tannheimer has had a hell of a season, earning herself starts on the IBU Cup, where she was regularly in the top 3 ski times and adaptation was a quick task – first top 20 on debut at Kontiolahti, first flower ceremony at Idre, first win at Sjusjøen – and after 11 straight races in the top 20, she got brought up to the World Cup for a debut at 18 years and 5 months, the youngest I can trace for a German débutante in the Datacenter. Where she promptly hit 10/10 for the first time all season and scored an almost miraculous top 15 from the late pot (albeit assisted by this being in Ruhpolding, with its somewhat forgiving range) which had all of Germany excited to see what they have in the pipeline. She then rested up for the Junior Worlds where she would be treated as a Junior despite being youth-aged, as per German tradition… winning gold in the Individual (19/20 and skiing rings around the field), silver in the Sprint and setting best time for her relay leg en route to gold there too. The team might consider her too young or inexperienced for a full-time World Cup gig next season, so she might be in a rotation spot, but we’re going to be seeing more of her at the World Cup in the near future, I’m certain of it.

#6: Océane Michelon (FRA)

04/03/2002 (U22)
World Cup: 21 points in 4 races
European Championships: 124 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 679 points in 14 races
Total points: 953.8
Development Index score: 45.42

Michelon’s 2023-24 season was one of excellent progress; she had outgrown the Junior Cup last season but her IBU Cup PPR was 13.29. That was improved exponentially this season to 48.50, meaning her average finish position was 5th across 14 races. Not bad considering she started the year with a 35th place finish – she just followed it up with five top 5s out of 7 races in the rest of December, earning herself a promotion alongside Jeanne Richard to the World Cup. While Michelon didn’t sparkle as much as her teammate in the opportunity, she was still perfectly serviceable as a World Cup competitor, scoring points in all four races she did across Oberhof and Ruhpolding, though notably she did fall backwards in both pursuits. Still, a best of 28th shows that she had potential to stick, it’s just that the French team’s strength in depth meant they wanted to rotate people back in and she was the least established member. Two top 10s and a bronze medal (in the pursuit, too) at the European Championships then followed as she tried to get back into the World Cup team – unfortunately there was absolutely no room at the inn, so Michelon was forced to revise her goals and go after the IBU Cup overall to earn the team an extra entrant in the first two World Cups next season. Had she not had her World Cup sojourn she’d have done it easily, but as it was it went to the wire, with the dynamic Michelon against Jenny Enodd, who essentially is another Horchler/Högberg type. Finishing the season with four podiums out of five at Obertilliach, Michelon made it academic. She will likely get to keep the bonus World Cup entry she’s earned the team by winning the IBU Cup, her mission to start next season will be to force the team to keep her on after. France is deep in elite women’s talent, but Michelon is undoubtedly World Cup ready.

#5: Johanna Puff (GER)

02/07/2002 (U22)
World Cup: 67 points in 7 races
IBU Cup: 431 points in 9 races
Total points: 788
Development Index score: 49.25

Puff actually raced surprisingly sparingly this season – possibly however that is a result of the scheduling when she got promoted to the World Cup at the end of each trimester and that she went with the 6th selection for the World Championships, sitting out to learn from the experience but not expected to participate. However, she had definitely earned the right to compete at the World Cup level, going at 47.89 PPR in the IBU Cup, suggesting an average finish in the top 5, so has little left to prove at that level. It took a few races to adapt to the World Cup (the first attempt at Lenzerheide was abortive, albeit possibly only as illness/injury cover with Covid having hit the team after Östersund) and she was most definitely helped by contesting a pair of Individuals at Antholz and Oslo “back to back” (they were consecutive races for her but about a month apart) where her strong shooting could carry her first to the points and then to her career best of 18th. In the final trimester, essentially if she shot well, she scored points but she still has work to do to become a regular. The problem for her is that she has nothing left to prove at the IBU Cup, but has she done enough to make an automatic World Cup berth next season? You’d think Preuß, Voigt, Hettich-Walz and Grotian have four spots nailed down, so she’ll be competing for two spots with a few more experienced athletes as well. I think she deserves it, and her end of season here showed her adapting to the World Cup level fairly well so she probably has a strong case, but it’s far from guaranteed that she doesn’t have to do it all over again next year in her first senior season.

#4: Maren Kirkeeide (NOR)

01/03/2003 (U21)
World Cup: 66 points in 9 races
European Championships: 255 points in 3 races
IBU Cup: 334 points in 7 races
Total points: 1003
Development Index score: 52.79

Kirkeeide is Norway’s best female prospect and for my money it’s by some margin. She had a couple of World Cup races last season and while the 25th place at Holmenkollen may have been helped by the home crowd, that she did it as a first year junior is still impressive. In this, her second year, she took another step forward; last year’s performances would have earned her a score of 42.02, improving that suggests she’s essentially reached World Cup-ready status. Her IBU Cup PPR is much of a muchness with Puff’s, but she stands above the German for two reasons. Firstly, that at the European Championships she was absolutely dominant, winning the Individual, winning the Pursuit and finishing 2nd in the Sprint, and secondly, on the World Cup, she showed more competitive ski speed more quickly and while – again – she may benefit from home knowledge on the Oslo trails, she set her PB in the same race as Puff, on the same shooting record, finishing 12th to Puff’s 18th, and also at Soldier Hollow while she had a pretty poor sprint, she then scored points in the pursuit hitting 20/20 in a H2H race, which is an important skill to have at the World Cup level. She also has yet to miss a pursuit, with every bad race at least being in the position to salvage something of the week; she is a gritty and tenacious competitor who never seems to give up. I rate her highly.

#3: Jeanne Richard (FRA)

13/04/2002 (U22)
World Championships: 49 points in 2 races
World Cup: 157 points in 12 races
IBU Cup: 408 points in 8 races
Total points: 1527
Development Index score: 69.41

Early in the season it certainly felt like Richard was nailed on to hit the #1 spot here, but alas, that form could not last all season. Nevertheless it was a season of huge progress for Richard, who now feels safely entrenched in the French World Cup squad, likely trading the #4/5 spot with Sophie Chauveau behind the big 3 stars of the team. Last season’s results would have yielded a score of 25.10, even with her fantastic Junior World Championships, which shows you how she’s made a clear and obvious leap forward this season. She started the season tearing up the IBU Cup, with only one race before Christmas outside the top 8 and scoring enough points to finish 16th in the overall despite not racing there once after December was over; instead she went to Oberhof where she arrived with a bang, scoring two consecutive top 10s on World Cup debut. While that kind of form was impossible to maintain, nevertheless she got two top 20s at the World Championships and has only missed the points at the World Cup level once; she started to drop to minor points by season’s end but she’s clearly shown she’s capable of troubling at least the flowers going forward. Hell, she’s still an U22, and if you look at the career path Justine Braisaz-Bouchet took to get from promising 18-year-old to where she is now, you’ll know that as long as she can keep herself in the position to hold a World Cup berth, she’ll have time on her side to turn into the race winner she clearly has the capability to be long-term.

#2: Selina Grotian (GER)

25/03/2004 (U20)
World Championships: 52 points in 2 races
World Cup: 221 points in 15 races
IBU Cup: 115 points in 2 races
Total points: 1573
Development Index score: 82.79

I mean, it’s always been easy to joke about Grotian basically being a clone of Laura Dahlmeier, what with her round face and shock of curly hair, and her monster last laps, but she doesn’t half make it easy to make those comparisons; Grotian actually arrived on the World Cup sooner than Laura, since it was at the World Championships of her age-19 year that Laura debuted to such fanfare whereas Grotian had already built herself a World Cup spot. She started well after a mis-step in the Individual in Sweden, hitting 21st in sprint and pursuit there, and matching that PB in Oberhof. Notably however, she did tail off as trimesters continued in the first half of the season, culminating in the somewhat unfair demotion to the IBU Cup to give Tannheimer a rotation – whether her immediate return was planned or not, however, Selina gave the selectors no choice by immediately showing she was too good for that level. At that point her score on my system was hovering around ~45 but she absolutely exploded onto the scene in the late season, starting with that 20/20 4th place in the World Championships Individual – exactly matching the point where Dahlmeier “arrived”, so to speak. And just for added symmetry, where were those World Championships in 2013? Why, Nové Město of course! The final trimester saw Grotian really improve her standing and settle as a leader of the future, with 5 back to back races in the top 20 in the North American legs and excellent relay showings. She’s still developing but only because her potential ceiling is pretty stratospheric. And she’s still eligible for this countdown for three more years.

#1: Anna Gandler (AUT)

05/01/2001 (U23)
World Championships: 117 points in 4 races
World Cup: 351 points in 18 races
Total points: 2512
Development Index score: 114.18

Being a January 2001 birth, Gandler is about the oldest athlete eligible for this, and she was certainly poised to break out before – her score for 2022-23 would have been 59.71, slotting in below Richard but above Kirkeeide and Puff for a comparison to this year. She was already becoming a reliable source of points at the World Cup level last season, but this year she upped her PPR from 9.67 to 19.50, as well as having an excellent World Championships where she was top 20 in every race and matched her PB of 7th in the Mass Start. However, while she was already the top dog on my previous run-through of the scores, she really stretched away with a stunning final trimester, finishing 6-8-6-6-5 across the races in the North American legs of the World Cup. If I’d said at any point pretty much in the last ten years that Lisa Theresa Hauser was not the number one talent in the Austrian team, people would have thought I was mad. But Gandler is making that a reality – she comes from a biathlon family, has Red Bull’s backing, is media-friendly and photogenic, she has every chance of becoming a superstar in the coming years.

Takeaways
It’s very clear from the results that based on these metrics, the teams with the best-stocked cupboards of prospects are the German and French teams, with seven and six athletes respectively (plus of course Maya Cloetens did come up through the French system until declaring for Belgium a couple of seasons ago). Of these, the Germans look to be in the best position, with six athletes ranking in the top 20. This is especially notable given none of their athletes mentioned are U23s, and only two – Puff and Schumann – are graduating junior eligibility this season. Their problem is likely to be more one of having enough spaces in races to give everybody their chances and I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody finds themselves squeezed out in the same way as Fany Bertrand was this season, losing her IBU Cup spot and starting on the Junior Cup instead. Since the end of the season Emily Schumann has managed to injure her cruciate ligaments as well, which may limit her in her first post-junior season as well, and with so many athletes who are capable – remember, many of these athletes only got their opportunities this season with Kebinger and Weidel calling their seasons early due to illness and injury – then winning a place back after a disappointing showing or two might be easier said than done. It’s also why I can’t guarantee Puff doesn’t have to go through it all again next season; I feel she’s done enough to merit a permanent spot as the #5/#6 member of the team for the first trimester and she has nothing left to prove at the IBU Cup – but there are a lot of capable athletes vying for those two spots.

The Norwegians are a little harder to gauge; they only have 3 athletes in the top 30, one of whom – Stræte – is a U23 who did relatively little racing. Only Kirkeeide looks like a “sure-fire” World Cup athlete at this stage. But then, they also have the strongest national calendar in the sport and can sustain athlete development domestically far better; Arnekleiv hit the World Cup running this year in her U25 year, and athletes like Berger and Olsbu/Røiseland have really kicked on their results in their mid-20s. Frida Dokken was just outside the top 30 in her U23 year and they had some decent scores from those who only raced the World Juniors, but not enough for them to show up here and certainly nothing to compare to the well-stocked production line of young talent they have on the men’s team. Sweden, on the other hand, might sound some alarms. Sara Andersson has got herself back on track after a somewhat disappointing 2022-23, but she appears to be the only major talent in the pipeline until Elsa Tänglander, who is only 16, and the team’s Junior World Championships results were alarmingly uncompetitive outside of those two athletes. Like the Norwegians, the Swedes tend not to fulfil their allocation at the Junior Cup, but the results here would suggest that this perhaps looks to be a policy worth reconsidering.

The Italians are another team that really stand out here, with four talents in the top 30, two of whom having graduated the junior ranks and the other two still competing in them. They didn’t have the best season relative to expectation – however the junior-age competitors did progress on last season (although Scattolo has yet to reach the same heights as 2021-22 again) and they also have Linda Zingerle – whose score was hurt by terrible form at the Junior World Championships – and Fabiana Carpella – who struggled at the start of the season in her first year as a junior but was scoring good results in the final couple of IBU Cups – to back up the post-Wierer generation.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in putting this together, however, was that the other team to put four athletes in the top 30 was the Austrians; before Lisa Theresa Hauser came along they could be described as very much a marginal team in women’s biathlon, but they’ve become a pretty competitive team. And while athletes being at the lower end of this countdown at the U22 and U23 stage in their development means they can very much be described as ‘projects’ rather than ‘sure things’ at the World Cup level, they also have Gandler up at #1 and very much having arrived as a genuine World Cup race winning contender towards the end of her second World Cup season, and in Andexer they have somebody who if anything the team held back by racing at a lower level than she was able to compete at; she will be one of the most interesting prospects to keep an eye on for next season and if they are able to capitalise on the latter years of Hauser’s career while getting the most out of Gandler and Andexer they could become a surprising force in the coming seasons.

The points scale here does see larger differences and bigger points scores the higher the level an athlete is competing at; this is somewhat deliberate as these athletes, and the differences between them, are the ones we have the greatest degree of certainty about. If she stays healthy, you really wonder what kind of score an athlete like Selina Grotian could be putting up in three years’ time.

Posted in Biathlon Media, Statistical analysis | Tagged results, youth

The Path to GOAT Status

Posted on 2023-03-25 | by Dan Covaciu | Leave a Comment on The Path to GOAT Status

Guest Essay by Dan Covaciu

How Johannes Thingnes Boe can claim the status of the Greatest Biathlete of All Time?

The current layout of the Biathlon GOAT debate

               There are few sporting discussions that are more debated and polarizing than Greatest of All Time (GOAT) conversations. In many disciplines, like basketball with the LeBron James – Michael Jordan discussion, there are analysts, fans, and even athletes themselves presenting their position on such a topic. However, every once in a while, an athlete comes out of the pack in such a dominant fashion, with remarkable longevity that it gets sporting minds questioning their position in all-time rankings. Such a case is the Norwegian Johannes Thingnes Boe, a 29-year-old biathlete from Stryn. Throughout his 10-year senior career, the Markane IL athlete has won multiple World Cup titles, with many international, World, and Olympic Titles to complete an impressive resume. His skiing speed has been a staple of his dominance for years, while his shooting has been up-and-down, with some superb performances, surrounding other inconsistent results in the range. JT has been at the top of his sport for more than half a decade, he has imposed himself in many ways, yet he may not be the GOAT in many people’s books. That is due to the impacts that Ole Einar Bjoerndalen and Martin Fourcade have had on the sport. Before delving more into the data, the outlook of this battle has JT in 3rd currently, in my books. Consequently, we will be analysing the results and steps he still has to reach GOAT status before retiring and focusing on his family and life outside of biathlon.

First Candidate – Ole Einar Bjoerndalen

Ole Einar Bjoerndalen’s World Cup results per season

Firstly, it is time to meet the two men who are in JT’s way of being the GOAT of male biathlon. Starting with, the one and only mythical figure of biathlon, Ole Einar Bjoerndalen. Fellow Norwegian Bjoerdalen holds the record for most wins at the World Cup level, with 94, as well as the record for the most podium places at 178 rostrum appearances. His 25-year-long career had many ups and downs. However, it has changed the record books for good. He holds the record for most individual Olympic Gold medals, and most individual World Championships wins and has 6 World Cup titles to boot. Furthermore, Ole Einar also has 6-second place finishes in the World Cup Total Standings level and one 3rd place in the overall standings. Without a shadow of a doubt, the sheer numbers possessed by the mythical biathlete are the best of all time. But, numbers without context are not as telling in the discussion that we will partake in today. Still, Ole Einar still has the best longevity out of the 3 contenders. In an attempt to give some context to the raw metrics provided, let’s analyse the 10-year sample of Ole Einar’s peak to get a better understanding of how good the Norwegian was at his best.   

            

NameRacesRank (Avg)WinsWin%2nd3rdPodiumsPodium%
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen47211.99419.9533117837.7
Table 1: Ole Einar Bjoerndalen’s World Cup Career Race Statistics
NameTotal SeasonsOverall Titles2nd3rdDiscipline Titles2nd3rd
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen2666120125
Table 2: Ole Einar Bjoerndalen’s World Cup Standings Statistics
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen’s average race rank (per season)

               When analysing peaks, we will be looking at the average race ranking during the 10-year span and the best year of the athlete’s career. Furthermore, we will analyse the number of wins and percentage of victories taken in that span, as well as their importance. Consequently, in Ole Einar Bjoerndalen’s case, the average race ranking from 1999 to 2009 was an impressive 5.56. However, in an even more insane fashion, the best season in that analysis, the 2004-05 season, had an average rank of 2.1. That means that in most races that season Bjoerndalen was first or second. Out of 208 races in that span, the Norwegian won 79 and podiumed in 126. The winning percentage is at a stunning 37.98%, while the podium percentage raises to 60.57%. In his best season, Bjoerndalen won 60% of all his races, while podiuming in 75%. These statistics showcase how impressive his career was and why he has long been considered one of the greatest of the sport. One record that the Norwegian does not hold, however, is the record for most World Cup titles. This record stands at 7 titles and is currently in the possession of French superstar, Martin Fourcade.

Second Candidate – Martin Fourcade

Martin Fourcade’s World Cup results per season

               The French idol, Martin Fourcade has notched up 79 wins at the World Cup level in his 15-year career, with 145 podiums to boot. The biathlete from Ceret does hold the record number of World Cup Title wins as previously mentioned, but he also has the record for most Discipline Titles, at an astounding 26. Overall, out of 15 years in the sport, he finished on the podium of the World Cup in 9 of the seasons. And when looking at his performances at major events, it is unlikely we may see someone with better performances under the brightest of light. Martin has won 11 World Titles, with 7 other medals to boot, for a win percentage at the World Championship level of 30.6%. At the Winter Olympics, Fourcade has 4 gold and 6 podiums overall, for a winning percentage of 33.3%. Based on these statistics, Fourcade was supremely consistent, winning more World Cups and Discipline Titles than his rivals, with a higher win percentage in the major events. Furthermore, he has one of the best peaks the world has ever seen, but let’s take a look and observe where it stands compared to Ole Einar’s peak marks.

NameRacesRank (Avg)WinsWin%2nd3rdPodiumsPodium%
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen47211.99419.9533117837.7
Martin Fourcade2758.27928.7402614552.7
Table 3: Comparison between Martin Fourcade’s and Bjoerndalen’s World Cup Career Race Statistics
NameTotal SeasonsOverall Titles2nd3rdDiscipline Titles2nd3rd
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen2666120125
Martin Fourcade157112644
Table 4: Comparison between Martin Fourcade’s and Bjoerndalen’s World Cup Career Standings Statistics
Martin Fourcade’s average race rank (per season)

               The 10-year selection in the career of Martin Fourcade spans from the 2010-11 season to the end of his career in 2020. Throughout his peak, the iconic Frenchman had an average race rank of 6.07. While in his best season, he reached an almost record-breaking mark of 2.2. These statistics are close, yet not quite beating Bjoerndalen’s peak results. However, if we delve deeper into the stats, Martin raced more races throughout his 10-year peak, at 241, winning 80 of them. That gives him a winning percentage of 33.19%, meaning that he won 1 out 3 races he entered in that span. In regards to podiums in that span, Martin podiumed 145 of those races, at a rate of 60.16%. Finally, in his best season, Fourcade finished with a winning percentage of 53.8%, while finishing on the podium in 84.6% of races that year – which is not even his highest mark on that statistic of his career. Overall, while Fourcade won 7 World Cups in that span, compared to “only” the 5 won by the great Ole Einar Bjoerndalen in his selected prime, I believe that these advanced numbers show one clear trend. While, the Norwegian had the slightly better peak, in terms of consistency of results, no one could overcome the French rocket that is Martin Fourcade. So, now it is time to take a look at this generation’s answer to these two greats.

This Generation’s GOAT Candidate – Johannes Thingnes Boe

Johannes Thingnes Boe’s results per season

               Johannes Thingnes Boe currently boasts an impressive 71 career wins at the World Cup level and a total of 109 podium appearances. These figures provide Boe with some very competitive win and podium percentages at 32.7% and 50.2%, respectively. These percentages are both above what Bjoerndalen has produced throughout his career, but also leading this discussion in terms of win percentage. Still, Fourcade holds an edge in terms of podium percentage. However, these statistics look good given that Johannes seems to be in his prime. When looking at World Cup titles, the Norwegian superstar officially won his 4 Big Globe after his dominant display on home ground in Oslo last weekend. And even though these numbers are lower than what both other GOATs have produced, Johannes has finished on the podium of the World Cup standings in an astounding 8 out of 13 seasons. Furthermore, in terms of discipline titles, he has what for this discussion could be seen as a “measly” number of 9 small globes.

NameRacesRank (Avg)WinsWin%2nd3rdPodiumsPodium%
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen47211.99419.9533117837.7
Martin Fourcade2758.27928.7402614552.7
Johannes Thingnes Boe2177.97132.7211710950.2
Table 5: Comparison between Johannes Boe’s World Cup Career Race Statistics with the GOAT contenders
NameTotal SeasonsOverall Titles2nd3rdDiscipline Titles2nd3rd
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen2666120125
Martin Fourcade157112644
Johannes Thingnes Boe13422984
Table 6: Comparison between Johannes Boe’s World Cup Career Standings Statistics

               In order to provide an overall, unbiased assessment, we can also analyse a 10-year sample of JT’s career. It is important to mention that if we start in the 2013-14 season, JT was 21 years old at the time and had yet to reach his prime. However, we will adjust for that later on. In this 10-year stretch, Boe’s average race rank is 7.64, with the best mark of 1.7 (meaning he is on average in the top 2 positions) this season. When we delve deeper into his results, of the 223 races in which he has competed, JT won 74 and finished on the podium in 113 races. These turn out at a percentage of 33.18% winning rate and a 50.67% podium rate. When analysing his best season to date, the just-finished 2022-23 season, his winning percentage was 82.6%, while his podium percentages reached the peaks of 95.7%. These are outstanding, never-seen-before marks that may never be replicated and it marks 2022-23 as the best biathlon season I’ve ever witnessed at the very least. Overall, the marks over a 10-year span are slightly down on the other two GOATs, but Johannes is currently having the greatest, most dominant statistical season in this conversation. As mentioned, though, he was not in his prime at the start of this 10-year span, so we can make a correction for this.

Johannes Thingnes Boe’s average race rank (per season)

               Assuming that Johannes will remain in the later stages of his peak until the 2026 Olympic Games in Cortina, we can analyse his last 7 seasons as a sample of his “peak”. This should give us a better view of how good the Norwegian was and may continue to be while at his best. In this sample, JT’s average race rank is 5.19. Furthermore, in the last 7 seasons, he has participated in 155 races, winning 63, for a 40.64% winning rate, with 99 podiums at a 63.87% rate. If we separate these 7 seasons, the dominant Boe has better statistics than either of the other two GOATs. As a result, we can clearly tell that he belongs in this conversation but is not yet the GOAT. A similar story can be told when analysing championship-level races between the three.

NameWinsPodiumsNo. of Races
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen79 (37.98%)126 (60.57%)208
Martin Fourcade80 (33.19%)145 (60.16%)241
Johannes Thingnes Boe63 (40.64%)99 (63.87%)155
Table 7: Comparing the Primes of the 3 GOAT contenders

Championship Level Races

               A great is made in the moments when the pressure to deliver is at its highest. Much like the old adage – Diamonds are made under pressure – an athlete’s complete profile (both physiologically, both also psychologically) is seen at Championship events. We will focus on the statistics of the three when it comes to World Championships and Olympic level events.

NameRacesRank (Avg)WinsWin%2nd3rdPodiumsPodium%
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen1910.8526.331947.4
Martin Fourcade129.2433.320650.0
Johannes Thingnes Boe1215.3325.001433.3
Table 8: Olympic Games Results of the GOAT Candidates
NameRacesRank (Avg)WinsWin%2nd3rdPodiumsPodium%
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen699.41115.9692637.7
Martin Fourcade367.11130.6431850.0
Johannes Thingnes Boe284.8725621553.6
Table 9: World Championship Results of the GOAT Candidates
NameRacesRank (Avg)WinsWin%2nd3rdPodiumsPodium%
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen889.71618.29103539.8
Martin Fourcade487.61531.3632450.0
Johannes Thingnes Boe407.91025631947.5
Table 10: Total Championship Level Results of the GOAT Candidates

               Based on these statistics, we can notice that Martin Fourcade has been the most consistent top-level performer among the three. Still, we need to take Ole Einar Bjoerndalen’s statistics with a pinch of salt due to his incredible longevity that resulted in some lesser performances in his later Championship presences. On the other hand, we can see that JT Boe is coming along nicely in terms of stats, and especially at World Championship level seems to consistently fight for top 5s. However, he still misses a bit in comparison with the other two. I believe that with this, we can finally rank the top performers of all time, albeit this is the part in which controversy may start to present its head.

Current Ranking of the GOATs

               While, this is an extraordinarily difficult ranking to make and I believe the best solution would be a tie, for clarity (and a bit of controversy), there should be one current GOAT. While at Championship level events Martin Fourcade holds a clear edge over the two, and especially the direct competitor (for now), Ole Einar, it is difficult to look past the sheer numbers Bjoerndalen possesses. In terms of total wins, number of Championship medals, number of podiums at World Cup level, as well number of discipline title podiums, Bjoerndalen has an edge based on his longevity. Combined with a phenomenal peak that slightly outshines Martin’s, I believe that by the narrowest of margins, the current, rightful owner of the GOAT moniker is Ole Einar Bjoerndalen. Even so, I believe that people will have different views on this and if Martin is the GOAT in your opinion, I would not put too much of a fight to argue. This does however, give us clarity as to what the template for Johannes is to take over this debate. Consequently, after all this analysis, let me present you my criteria for JT Boe becoming the GOAT of biathlon.

The Criteria to Become the Undisputed GOAT

               Firstly, in regard to sheer numbers, Johannes is not yet at the level of Ole Einar, and Martin. Starting with the World Cup Titles, JT officially earned his 4th Crystal Globe. To achieve GOAT status, I believe that 6 would be sufficient and that would entail winning two of the next 3 seasons we earlier assumed as his prime. In terms of discipline titles, the Norwegian won the Sprint and Pursuit classifications this year. This notched his tally up to 9 individual, smaller Crystal Globes. I believe this is the trickiest category to give an assessment of what he would have to achieve as it is of varying importance to every fan, and journalist. Still, if he finishes his career with more than 15 titles, with another 12-16 2nd and 3rd places in those classifications, it would meet my criteria. While these are quite high standards, based on this season, JT could have won all discipline titles, had it not been for a bout with COVID that kept him out of the Oestersund round of the World Cup. As such, the extraordinary Norwegian has taught us throughout the season that nothing is impossible for him. However, there is more to it than just raw titles won.

Fourcade vs. Boe World Cup race ranks

               Secondly, when analysing winning World Cup races, I consider that if he wins more than 85 races with a winning percentage higher than 30% that would meet my criteria. Furthermore, if he overtakes Fourcade’s podium number of 145 while increasing his podium percentage over the value of 50%, that would more than merit GOAT status. Looking at the big events, starting with the World Championships, my criteria would be that he joins the GOAT group with 11 golds, at least, while increasing his winning percentage in the region of 28-30%, from his current 25% mark. In terms of podiums, I would like to see him with more than 20 medals overall, while maintaining his incredible podium rate (currently 53.6%) above 50%. Finally, in terms of the Olympic Games, JT would have to match Ole Einar’s 5 individual gold medals tally, while overtaking Martin Fourcade’s 6 podiums (he currently has 3 individual golds, with 4 podiums). Furthermore, I would like to see him increase his win and podium percentages from the current marks of 25% and 33% up to around 30% and 40-45%, respectively. If the Norwegian were to achieve these admittedly high criteria, in the next 3 seasons, assuming his peak ends with the end of this Olympic cycle, that would also give him one of the best 10-year primes, if not the best in history. Consequently, he would take the lead in the GOAT discussion in my books.

               Most importantly, we can already say that Johannes is a generational talent who has had an incredible career. He is the leader of the post-Fourcade era of biathlon. Only time will tell whether he will be able to surpass the former faces of biathlon in Martin Fourcade and Ole Einar Bjoerndalen. However, I have raised the bar and presented my criteria and I will be enjoying watching whether Johannes Thingnes Boe can match it or better it.

Posted in Long-term trends, Statistical analysis | Tagged Data, results

Most improved athletes this winter

Posted on 2022-12-24 | by real biathlon | Leave a Comment on Most improved athletes this winter

Season-to-season improvements in Total Performance Scores of regular World Cup athletes. The last row of both tables shows improvement and decline in overall scores for this season’s World Cup trimester 1 compared to performances in trimester 1 last season (only athletes with at least 5 races this winter). You can do your own season-to-season comparisons for all stats in the Patreon bonus area.


Note: The scores are standard scores (or z-scores), indicating how many standard deviations (SD) an athlete is back from the World Cup mean (negative values indicate performances better than the mean). The Total Performance Score is calculated by approximating the importance of skiing, hit rate and shooting pace using the method of least squares (for more details, see here and here), and then weighting each z-score value accordingly.


Men

2022–23 z-Scores compared to 2021–22 | Non-Team events

NoFamily NameGiven NameNationRacesSki Speed
Score
Hit Rate
Score
Range Time
Score
Total
Performance
Score
Change
NoFamily NameGiven NameNationRacesSki Speed
Score
Hit Rate
Score
Range Time
Score
Total
Performance
Score
Change
1HartwegNiklasSUI
6-0.97-1.41-1.47-1.16-0.99
2AndersenFilip FjeldNOR
8-1.17-0.85-0.44-0.99-0.63
3ClaudeFlorentBEL
8-0.64-1.420.25-0.76-0.56
4GuzikGrzegorzPOL
50.07-0.070.590.09-0.50
5GiacomelTommasoITA
8-1.210.20-1.92-0.88-0.48
6LaegreidSturla HolmNOR
8-1.59-1.42-1.85-1.57-0.42
7BoeJohannes ThingnesNOR
8-1.98-0.94-1.37-1.60-0.42
8PonsiluomaMartinSWE
8-1.490.40-0.91-0.87-0.36
9DohertySeanUSA
8-0.360.20-0.89-0.26-0.36
10ReesRomanGER
8-1.06-1.04-0.40-0.98-0.35
11StvrteckyJakubCZE
6-1.110.520.34-0.46-0.33
12IlievVladimirBUL
5-0.890.640.25-0.31-0.30
13StroliaVytautasLTU
8-1.01-0.91-0.42-0.91-0.28
14SimaMichalSVK
60.44-0.860.730.10-0.26
15LapshinTimofeiKOR
5-0.29-0.36-1.91-0.50-0.25
16KomatzDavidAUT
70.00-1.360.80-0.30-0.25
17MagazeevPavelMDA
60.09-0.821.950.05-0.25
18KarlikMikulasCZE
5-0.611.040.940.05-0.23
19HiidensaloOlliFIN
8-0.54-0.56-0.52-0.54-0.22
20TachizakiMikitoJPN
60.71-1.27-0.010.05-0.20
21DollBenediktGER
8-1.41-0.27-0.71-1.00-0.17
22ClaudeFabienFRA
8-1.48-0.75-0.76-1.18-0.16
23NelinJesperSWE
8-1.24-0.750.57-0.88-0.14
24KrcmarMichalCZE
8-0.98-0.75-0.12-0.81-0.08
25BrandtOskarSWE
5-0.901.350.65-0.06-0.07
26WrightCampbellNZL
50.160.29-0.240.15-0.06
27PerrotEricFRA
5-0.810.64-0.13-0.31+0.00
28ZahknaReneEST
70.52-0.80-0.130.06+0.07
29DudchenkoAntonUKR
7-0.62-0.68-1.15-0.70+0.08
30GuigonnatAntoninFRA
8-1.09-0.37-0.34-0.79+0.12
31Fillon MailletQuentinFRA
8-1.07-1.23-1.21-1.13+0.14
32LeitnerFelixAUT
8-0.31-1.04-0.71-0.57+0.16
33RunnallsAdamCAN
60.100.11-1.77-0.12+0.17
34LangerThierryBEL
6-0.350.80-0.29-0.01+0.20
35BoeTarjeiNOR
8-1.30-0.37-0.54-0.94+0.21
36SamuelssonSebastianSWE
8-1.23-0.75-0.38-0.99+0.21
37FemlingPeppeSWE
7-0.500.22-1.39-0.40+0.21
38ChristiansenVetle SjaastadNOR
8-1.52-0.47-0.20-1.06+0.23
39SeppalaTeroFIN
7-1.030.22-0.75-0.63+0.23
40JacquelinEmilienFRA
8-1.610.11-0.89-1.02+0.24
41NawrathPhilippGER
5-0.62-0.200.21-0.40+0.31
42KuehnJohannesGER
7-1.260.67-0.47-0.60+0.32
43EderSimonAUT
5-0.41-0.67-0.52-0.50+0.32

Women

2022–23 z-Scores compared to 2021–22 | Non-Team events

NoFamily NameGiven NameNationRacesSki Speed
Score
Hit Rate
Score
Range Time
Score
Total
Performance
Score
Change
NoFamily NameGiven NameNationRacesSki Speed
Score
Hit Rate
Score
Range Time
Score
Total
Performance
Score
Change
1KlemencicPolonaSLO
7-0.91-0.290.20-0.59-0.68
2VittozziLisaITA
8-1.29-0.92-1.28-1.18-0.47
3KinnunenNastassiaFIN
5-0.48-0.040.56-0.23-0.46
4GasparinAitaSUI
8-0.53-0.75-0.88-0.64-0.45
5ComolaSamuelaITA
7-0.23-1.01-0.04-0.43-0.44
6SimonJuliaFRA
8-1.38-1.10-1.79-1.34-0.42
7MinkkinenSuviFIN
7-0.26-1.22-0.96-0.62-0.39
8EderMariFIN
8-1.350.46-0.09-0.67-0.37
9Batovska FialkovaPaulinaSVK
8-0.71-0.23-0.42-0.53-0.36
10TandrevoldIngrid LandmarkNOR
8-1.33-1.01-0.48-1.13-0.31
11KnottenKaroline OffigstadNOR
8-0.35-1.01-1.12-0.63-0.26
12ChevalierChloeFRA
8-0.99-0.49-0.13-0.74-0.26
13VoigtVanessaGER
8-0.92-1.360.36-0.90-0.25
14LunderEmmaCAN
6-0.54-0.76-1.49-0.72-0.25
15ZdoucDunjaAUT
70.15-1.01-0.79-0.30-0.23
16ReidJoanneUSA
6-0.17-0.130.14-0.12-0.22
17SchwaigerJuliaAUT
7-0.370.010.06-0.20-0.21
18PerssonLinnSWE
8-0.98-1.01-1.30-1.03-0.20
19MakaAnnaPOL
5-0.15-0.370.51-0.13-0.15
20TachizakiFuyukoJPN
7-0.28-1.010.79-0.36-0.13
21MagnussonAnnaSWE
8-0.71-0.84-0.82-0.76-0.12
22IrwinDeedraUSA
6-0.19-0.130.13-0.13-0.10
23WiererDorotheaITA
8-0.98-0.75-1.78-1.01-0.10
24ZukKamilaPOL
6-0.310.370.37-0.03-0.09
25TomingasTuuliEST
6-0.850.620.60-0.25-0.06
26LienIdaNOR
7-1.160.120.51-0.59-0.05
27Herrmann-WickDeniseGER
8-1.37-0.49-0.58-1.02-0.03
28KalkenbergEmilie AagheimNOR
7-0.25-0.60-0.79-0.42-0.03
29DavidovaMarketaCZE
8-1.02-0.92-1.20-1.01-0.00
30BendikaBaibaLAT
7-0.830.73-0.66-0.36+0.02
31Chevalier-BouchetAnaisFRA
8-1.22-0.49-1.13-1.00+0.04
32Haecki-GrossLenaSUI
8-0.940.46-1.09-0.55+0.04
33OebergElviraSWE
8-1.72-0.84-0.86-1.36+0.06
34HauserLisa TheresaAUT
8-0.93-0.84-1.44-0.97+0.16
35LieLotteBEL
7-0.38-1.22-0.13-0.59+0.17
36TodorovaMilenaBUL
7-0.540.32-0.32-0.26+0.19
37OebergHannaSWE
8-1.31-0.14-1.51-1.00+0.24
38PreussFranziskaGER
5-0.81-0.31-1.13-0.70+0.33
39StremousAlinaMDA
7-0.16-0.091.230.03+0.33
40JislovaJessicaCZE
7-0.15-0.70-0.49-0.35+0.40
41CharvatovaLucieCZE
6-0.401.25-0.880.02+0.42
42BlashkoDariaUKR
60.48-0.51-0.450.08+0.42
43FialkovaIvonaSVK
5-0.731.73-0.180.05+0.45
44BilosiukOlenaUKR
50.68-0.69-0.030.20+0.53
45NilssonStinaSWE
7-0.690.630.47-0.17+0.54

Posted in Statistical analysis | Tagged results, shooting, skiing

New biathlon point system

Posted on 2022-12-04 | by real biathlon | Leave a Comment on New biathlon point system

The International Biathlon Union (IBU) introduced a new scoring system for the Biathlon World Cup from this winter onwards: world championships will no longer be included in the World Cup score, no more dropped results and a major adjustment in the points system to increase the value between top results.

It’s arguably the biggest season-to-season change in the history of the sport and not everyone is happy with it.

Old vs. new biathlon point system

Rank Scoring system from
2008–09 to 2021–22
New scoring system from
2022–23
1 60 90
2 54 75
3 48 60
4 43 50
5 40 45
6 38 40
7-40 unchanged unchanged
(mostly) 2 dropped scores no dropped scores
WCH races count WCH no longer count

The IBU points system has always been an outlier compared to pretty much any other scoring system in sports, especially other FIS winter sports, because it greatly undervalued top results. Some people are concerned seasons will be decided too early now, others don’t like the fact that consistency is no longer as important. The fact that no results can be dropped any more has also been criticized by some athletes.

The new biathlon points system is still less extreme than the FIS scoring system or Formula One for example. Interestingly enough, the IBU prize money distribution has always been more top heavy than their scoring system. Let’s take a closer look at how previous seasons would have turned out with the new system.

For last season’s Overall World Cup, the new point system would have had very little effect. The top 3 for both men and women would be unchanged if you apply the rules of the new scoring system. The only World Cup score that would have been flipped is the women’s Mass Start score, which was won by Justine Braisaz-Bouchet, but now would go to Elvira Öberg with the new points system.

Both big crystal globes were won rather decisively, so it is no surprise a different scoring system wouldn’t change the outcome. For last season, there wouldn’t have been much difference in when the title race was over either. Both winners would have been crowned just one race earlier (Quentin Fillon Maillet would have clinched the title in the Otepää sprint, instead of the mass start, Marte Olsbu Røiseland would have won the title three instead of two races before the end of the season).

Things get more interesting for 2019–20. Here both the men’s and the women’s overall winner comes out different. It also gets quite complicated, because aside from the mere points, there’s also dropped results and the difference in world champion races to account for.

For the men, the season actually ended like this: Johannes Thingnes Bø 913, Martin Fourcade 911. With the new system Fourcade would have won 1019 vs. 1001. However, if you still count the world championship results, the outcome flips again, and Bø comes out on top (1286 vs. 1014).

It gets even more extreme on the women’s side. The actual score was very close: Dorothea Wierer 793, Tiril Eckhoff 786. However, using this winter’s scoring system, Eckhoff would have won the title quite easily (956 vs. 737). Mostly because of Wierer’s very strong and Eckhoff’s horrible 2020 WCHs in Antholz; results which would now no longer be included. If you count the championship races, Eckhoff still comes out on top (1039 vs. 1028), but only by 11 points, thanks to her 7 wins that season compared to Wierer’s 4.

Since 2011, five (out of 24) Overall World Cup decisions would have been changed due to the new scoring system (2011: Bø vs. Svendsen, 2014 Berger vs. Mäkäräinen, 2018 Mäkäräinen vs. Kuzmina, plus both winners in 2020 as mentioned above).

It seems that even with the new scoring system, World Cup seasons that were close before will still be close even with the bigger point spread. And for seasons with runaway winners, which we had several on the men’s side during the last decade, the point system doesn’t matter all that much. The biggest change is probably the fact that from now on wins and podiums will be much more important that consistent top 10 results.

Posted in Biathlon News, Statistical analysis

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