About the Blog
This is the blog for all things FIS and IBU World Cup statistics!
• Articles on statistical analysis of skiing
• Current Elo Scores
• Podium Prediction Game
• Forum
How it started:
• When I was in the Navy stationed on the east coast, I had nothing to do at the start of the pandemic besides work, workout, and spend time on my computer. We were not allowed to go anywhere including home to visit our families. The Cross-Country World Cup season had just ended and I had a pretty miserable showing in the Noah Hoffman Fantasy XC league, definitely finishing in the bottom half.
A couple months prior, I was visiting a college buddy in Vermont. On a longer ski, we were talking about the fantasy game and trying to figure out all the reasons why we performed so poorly. What we decided was that we had no official way to optimize performance world cup points based on the price of a skier. This caused me to think what would be the best way to measure a skier’s ability before deciding on Elo after reading about how fivethirtyeight implemented it with major American sports leagues.
So in March/April 2020, I created my own Elo system (which can be found in a separate blog), a linear model that mapped Elo scores to World Cup points, and a Knapsack algorithm that optimized these World Cup points to a budget.
After four years of using the same models with decent results, I’ve decided that I want to take the next step of sharing work with people. I also want to grow my data science skills by exploring ways to further optimize my coding and discover new paths to optimization. This blog is open to submissions or ideas from anyone as long as it is skiing or endurance sports related. Please enjoy!
