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Predicting race results

Posted on 2021-06-18 | by biathlonanalytics | Leave a Comment on Predicting race results

In February I wrote about a Tableau report that didn’t necessarily predict race outcomes for the World Championships but helped inform people to make better predictions or guesses. I still believe it helps to know who’s hot and not (recent race results), previous race results at the venue and discipline, and current standing in the World Cup, but I ran into a website that has built a model to predict race and season outcomes, and their results are interesting, to say the least.

When you consider how unpredictable biathlon can be, any decent results from a model are impressive if you ask me. In this article they describe how their model did against reality, and the results were good in many cases. In addition they have more articles evaluating their performance, and I would agree that they did well.

But models remain exactly that, models. And I am sure if the IBU held 150,000 races the reality would be closer to the models. But that’s the beauty of sport and biathlon: we don’t run the races that many time, so we have to consider the form of the day, athletes feeling sick but still participating, harder and softer snow conditions during the race, a loud crowd at the shooting range (remember those days?!?), etc. we can go and on about external qualitative factors that can, and will, impact race results. If a model predicts Laegreid to challenge for the yellow bib, and Hauser to win a specific race, I think they are on to something worth checking out.

I’m no betting person so I don’t see myself using it for that purpose ever, although I did participate in a fun fantasy game that relies on race predictions to determine the “most knowledgable biathlon person”. But in line with the dashboard I created myself, I think the model does a good job providing additional information that can help inform predictions, and also give more insight into biathlon and its athletes. And in the end, I’m happy it doesn’t predict race results with 95% certainty, as that would quickly end my interest in biathlon altogether!

Posted in Long-term trends, Statistical analysis

The Story Of Tiril Eckhoff

Posted on 2021-06-18 | by Brian Halligan | Leave a Comment on The Story Of Tiril Eckhoff

This victory in Oestersund marked Tiril Eckhoffs record breaking 13th victory in a single season. Breaking Magdelena Forsberg’s record of 12 victories in the 2000-2001 season. While biathlon fans today are familiar with the bubbly and exciting personality that Tiril is known for, this impressive accomplishment didn’t come easy. In today’s video, we will dive deep into the career of Tiril Eckhoff and see how the record that captivated fans during the 2021 season was an accomplishment of hard work and breaking through personal barriers.

Hopes were high for the young Norwegian athlete. At only 21 years old, Eckhoff had earned some impressive results at the IBU Junior World Championships only weeks prior to her W.C. debut: All of Norway could see the young athlete had a lot of promise and hopes for the future were high. Eckhoff continued to improve on the skis and established herself as one of the fastest skiers on the circuit by the 2013-2014 season and consistently earned in the top 20 results. Eckhoff earned a place on the Norwegian Olympic team and helped the women’s team capture a gold medal in the Sochi relay.

Tiril started off the 2014/15 season with a bang: earning her first world cup win by shooting 90% in the Oestersund Sprint. Despite Eckhoff consistently placing in the top 10 in ski speed and skiing 4.2% faster than the average biathlete, Tiril had a hole in her performance that would hold her back and actually make her finish lower in the standings than the previous season: a 79.4% shooting percentage. And specifically, a 74.1% standing percentage. Six times Tiril would clean her prone stage only to spoil the race with standing misses. In fact, Tiril only cleaned her standing twice during this season, and both times she did that she earned podium finishes. So what was Tirils plan to combat this weakness in her game: Ski faster! This plateau continued for several seasons: It was the same old story of fast skiing, good prone shooting and meltdowns in the standing stages.

Despite her plateau Eckhoff would occasionally excite the norwegian fan base with stellar performances. Most notably, her performance at the 2016 IBU World Championships at her home stadium of Oslo Holmenkollen. In front of the King of Norway, Eckhoff performed at her best winning the Sprint competition with clean shooting and helping the Norwegian Women’s relay team claim victory by bringing the team from 9th to 1st without missing a shot on the third leg.

In 2017 rumors began circulating that Tiril was having some issues with her vision and was focusing on rehabilitating her eyes. She told IBU TV she had “double vision” and spent a lot of time in the summer focusing on what she sees when she looks through the sights.

The results of her hard work began paying off in the 2019/2020 season where she bumped her shooting percentage up to 83% and skied 5.3% faster than the average athlete. This jump in the shooting percentages helped Tiril break through the ceiling and get back into the top 10 overall. Winning 7 races during the season and battled Italy’s Dorothea Wierer for the overall globe through the entire season which was cut due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

As mentioned in the beginning of the video, Tiril would go on to win 13 races this season and set a Women’s World Cup record. But the interesting thing about this accomplishment is when you look at her stats on the season, she actually under performed in the key areas that propped her up in previous seasons.

The area that gave Tiril her edge was the one piece that plagued her in the past: her standing shooting. Up a full 10% from the season before, Tiril had honed in the standing targets and was able to close the door on great victories. We see this all too often in biathlon where an athlete ruins a good race with poor standing shooting. And we also see examples of athletes coming back from poor starts to finish strong with good shooting in the later stages.

When you look at the numbers, this concept makes sense. In a typical 12.5k Women’s mass start each lap it takes the fastest skiers approximately 6:20 to ski the 2.5k course, this means at the completion of the last shooting an athlete only has 17.5% of the race remaining to make a comeback if needed. Whereas after the prone shooting 60% of the race remains.

Tiril Eckhoff’s dedication to focusing on her performance weaknesses and ability to break through her results plateau is a lesson for athletes around the world. Sticking with the training, and continuing to work hard can help you achieve new heights. It will be interesting to see if Tiril can continue her success this upcoming season. And it would be exciting to see what she could do if she could combine her new found standing ability with her highest prone percentages of years past.

Posted in Biathlon Media, Statistical analysis

Why you should check out Real Biathlon

Posted on 2021-06-07 | by biathlonanalytics | Leave a Comment on Why you should check out Real Biathlon

A few days ago @Realbiathlon posted on Twitter that his database has expanded. It now has almost 4,000 race data files for all three levels: World Cup, IBU Cup and Youth/Junior.

Why should this be important for any Biathlon lover? Well, it allows people to use it for analysis and creating visualizations to help understand things better for all three levels, and not have to start when the athletes reach the pinnacle of biathlon races in the World Cup. What did they do to get there? Were they always this good (or bad)? How long were they in the Youth/Junior level before moving to the IBU Cup and World Cup. And can we learn from what we know to predict future starts from how they perform at the lower levels? That is all in the data now available from RealBiathlon.com.

Yes, I write on his blog and yes, I am a data nerd. And although there is no denying the latter, don’t let the former fool you. I don’t get paid to write on his blog, I do it because I appreciate what he does. And hey, it gives me some exposure. Other than that, no catch. So what I write in this article is just because his work simply is very good, great for the biathlon community, and worth getting a subscription for.

And if you are curious about some of the things you can learn from the data, I encourage you to check out a previous post I wrote about IBU vs World cup data, and a dashboard I created with his data from all three levels starting in 2000-2001. It shows for example how Tiril Eckhoff has gone through the ranks and continuously improved her ski speed in relation to the top 3 in ski speed (per race and per season):

Same for JT Boe:

It also allows us to look at Ondrej Moravec’s career:

All this only scratches the surface of what is possible. So I encourage you to check out RealBiathlon.com and see what you can come up with! (and it has some pretty cool blog posts too! ;o))

Posted in Statistical analysis | Tagged Data

Is analytical comparison on your radar?

Posted on 2021-06-07 | by biathlonanalytics | Leave a Comment on Is analytical comparison on your radar?

Let’s just assume two athletes were really close in World Cup points with one more race to go. Wouldn’t it be nice to compare different statistics between the two of them? Radar charts are meant for just that particular situation! Every axis leg on a radar chart represents one statistic. And the position on that axis leg represents one of the athletes. You then connect the dots per athlete and boom! you have a Radar chart. Now if we add a line representing the Field Average and assume the inside that line is good, and outside of that line bad, and we can do some comparisons!

Going back to our example, why don’t compare JT Boe and SH Laegreid?

We can see here that SH Laegreid is faster than JT Boe for Z scores in shooting percentage, shooting time and range time, but that JT Boe is faster than SH Laegreid in the course time. On the women’s side, Eckhoff and Wierer show a very similar view:

The beauty of these Radar charts is we can do this for all sorts of analysis, like how the men and women from a Nation do when compared to the field average. Here is Norway as an example:

Mmm, I guess those Norwegians are pretty good! Another analysis we can do is comparing statistics per season. Lisa Vitozzi had a disappointing year, but where did things go wrong? The Radar chart below shows that although she was worse in every aspect shown in this chart, particularly her shooting percentage and range time were a lot worse than previous seasons:

I hope you have a better idea of what you can analyze with Radar charts, and that the power of them is to quickly see differences in statistics between multiple athletes, groups and seasons. Why don’t you go and try it out in the interactive dashboard where all the above charts were taken from? Can you find it on my profile on Tableau Public. I hope you have fun!

RJ

Posted in Statistical analysis | Tagged Comparison, Radar charts

Major database update

Posted on 2021-06-06 | by real biathlon | Leave a Comment on Major database update

The off-season has been the perfect opportunity to update the real biathlon database with race data of IBU Cup and Youth/Junior level events of the last two decades. You can now look up all second/third tier race results and statistics that are available in the IBU Datacenter on this website’s race pages – use the “Level” selection to change from “World” to “IBU” and “Y/J” level.

Almost all races since 2001–02 have detailed Loop Times (Course Times, Shooting Times, Range Times, etc.) which are available thanks to the IBU “Competition Analysis” PDF documents. Races since 2016–17 also include split times and target images/shot intervals. Patrons can access all race data through their MongoDB Atlas database access.

The chart shows how the number of World Cup level races evolved over time. From 1958 to 1977 the highest level consisted of mainly World Championship and Olympic races (1-3 per season). The first World Cup season in 1977–78 had a total of 15 events. That number rose to 43 in 1989–90 and 64 per season in 1999–00. Last winter set a new record with a total of 70 events.

Unfortunately, the data for IBU Cups and Junior World Championships is still incomplete. A second-tier competition, then called European Cup, has been held since 1982–83, however, the IBU data only goes back as far as 1998–99; detailed race results before that might be lost.

Junior World Championships exist since 1967, however, the earliest edition with IBU data is the 1997 event in Forni Avoltri (ITA). A detailed list of junior medals winners is available on the German Wikipedia (that page doesn’t cite any sources though).

In total, the real biathlon database currently holds information of 3904 races:

RacesRaces with
Loop Times
Races with
Live Data
Level 1 (World Cup)21871276245
Level 2 (IBU Cup)12351063206
Level 3 (Youth/Junior)482391117

The next step will be to integrate this new data into all tables and data available on this website, starting with the Athletes data. Right now, you will find nothing if you click on a name of an athlete who has never appeared in a World Cup race. This will probably still take some time, because the overall data size doubled with these new race files and there is no point doing this hastily – it has to be implemented somewhat efficiently in order to quickly update all data after each new race during the season.

Posted in Website updates | Tagged Data

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