You can now support real biathlon on PATREON. For your troubles, you get bonus statistics, direct database access and the knowledge that your support helps keep the website running and all statistics up to date.
Frankly, I feel a bit strange asking for contributions, but after some pretty high traffic for this site during the initial World Cup weekend, I fear that after putting a lot of time into this project in the summer, I now might have to pay for it in the winter – specifically covering costs for exceeding free-tier database limits. The ads on this site don’t generate a lot of money, so after thinking about it for a while, I decided to give this Patreon idea a try.
Since I didn’t just want to ask for donations with nothing in return, I came up with a few Patreon rewards I believe should be interesting for biathlon enthusiasts. I added a new page realbiathlon.com/patreon – you can get the password as a patron. Also, there’s the option to get direct database access; if that’s something you are interested in.
These are the bonus statistics I set up initially (there will probably be more later):
- Stats per Nation: All-time results and data for each country in individual events
- Season-to-Season Changes: Comparisons across seasons for most athlete statistics
- Race Projections: Predictions for each discipline and event based on season stats
- Long-term trends: Performance trends in ski speed, shooting accuracy and shooting pace
I hope most of these additional stats are quite useful and interesting. I compiled another data set for each national team, but this time with results not for relays, but for all non-team events per nation, including (averaged) shooting and skiing data.
France Men | Top 3 per race (10 race moving average)
Here are two examples of available bonus statistics: The first chart shows the French results declining a lot after Raphaël Poirée‘s retirement, but currently they are doing a lot better compensating for Martin Fourcade‘s absence. Germany’s women on the other hand had their peak in the mid-2000s (with over 20% of their athletes on the podium), and a steep decline after Magdalena Neuner‘s retirement.
Germany Women | Results per race
I have already used some of the other stats I created in recent posts, namely Ski Speed comparison season-to-season or Projection for the season opener; that should give you an idea what to expect (available for many other categories and seasons). Examples for long term biathlon trends can be seen here.
Should you be interested in digging into the data for yourself, I set up a way to allow direct access to the real biathlon databases in several programming languages (Java, Python, C#, C++, C, R) – please keep in mind you will need at least some programming skill to utilize them. All are MongoDB (NoSQL) databases hosted on MongoDB Atlas (data is in JSON format).
One thing I was especially unsure about was finding appropriate tier levels. I set up the higher tiers more as a joke – please only consider them if you are looking for a quick way to get rid of your money. 😉
real biathlon on PATREON