The new website allows you to look up basic biathlon data on your own (for different disciplines, periods, categories, etc.), so I won’t be posting too many of the regular statistical updates that I have done in the past. If you are interested in a specific statistic or ranking, you can always check out:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These will be updated after each race. I thought it would still be interesting though to take one high-level look at last season’s performances. Below I listed the season-to-season changes in the Overall Performance Score<\/a> of regular World Cup athletes (at least 14 races in the last two seasons).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Note: The scores are standard scores<\/a> (or z-scores), indicating how many standard deviations (SD) an athlete is back from the World Cup mean (negative values indicate values 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<\/a> (for more details, see here<\/a> and here<\/a>), and then weighting each z-score value accordingly.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u00c9milien Jacquelin<\/a> was the most improved athlete last season, getting better in all major aspects of the sport: 5.5% higher hit rate, 1.8% faster skiing and 1.8s lower range time. Vytautas Strolia<\/a> improved by the same amount, albeit on a much lower level, earning his first career top 20. They are followed by Johannes K\u00fchn<\/a>, who almost halved his average ski rank (12.3 to 6.7), and Erlend Bj\u00f8ntegaard<\/a>, who managed to increase his hit rate by 7.4%. On the flip side, Lukas Hofer<\/a>‘s and Benjamin Weger<\/a>‘s performance scores declined the most; both skiing over 1% slower; Hofer also hit 4.5% less of his targets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Martin Fourcade<\/a> ended his record-breaking career with his highest ever hit rate (91.8%), while his ski speed was almost back to his previous best (after a big decline in 2018\u201319): he had an average Course Time rank of 6.0 last winter \u2013 in 5 of his 7 title winning seasons his average ski rank was in the 4.5-5.0 range. The improvement of the French men really stand out (three in the top 10 below). Quentin Fillon Maillet<\/a> became the second-fastest skier overall (1.5% faster). Johannes Thingnes B\u00f8<\/a>‘s ski speed declined slightly (on the highest possible level), yet he managed to set the best shooting percentage (92.1%) for a World Cup winner ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2019\u201320<\/strong> z-Scores compared to 2018\u201319<\/strong> | Non-Team events<\/p>\n\n\n\nMen<\/h2>\n\n\n\n