If you grew up with comic books like me, you may have heard of Lucky Luke, the cowboy who could shoot faster than his shadow:
And when I think of fast shooting, I cannot think of anything else than Emilien Jacquelin’s standing shooting at the last World Championships, I believe it was the pursuit race:
You may remember from earlier posts that I am not Jacquelin’s biggest fan by any stretch, but that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate and respect something incredible! Anyway, it made me wonder about shooting times and how they possibly have changed in the last decade of racing. So what does one do: you go to realbiathlon.com and download some data, in this case, the shooting times for the last 10 seasons.
When we put all the data in Tableau Public and analyze the data we can see that over time there is a decline in prone, standing and average shooting times. Although I typically don’t like removing the 0-value from the vertical axis as it often leads to exaggerated images, here it does a better job of showing the change: about 2 seconds faster in 10 years!
Now of course these are just averages of all athletes from all nations in those 10 years. So what if we look at a subset of Nation’s averages:
The first chart is not something that adds much value for individual nations, but it does show that the trends vary by nation. The second chart shows some of the individual nations and that trends vary a lot with Canada, France, Latvia, Sweden and Ukraine the nations that have gotten faster over the last number of years. On the other hand, Austria and Italy have gotten a bit slower, and nations like Norway stayed more or less the same.
Lastly, I wanted to look at the individual level, and I hand-picked JT BOE as the world cup winner, Jacquelin as one of the fastest shooters, and Simon Eder as one of the best:
Simon Eder shows he is not only a good (accurate and precise) shooter but a pretty darn fast one as well, especially in Prone. Noticeable too is the small variance/spread for JT Boe in Prone and Jaquelin in both prone and standing.
I cannot wait for the new season to get started, and now I am extra curious to see if this faster shooting trend continues or if we see teams taking a step back and slowing things down a little to perhaps focus more on accuracy. Either way, it should be another great season!