Athletes to look out for in the new season

This article looks at the new biathlon season using the Performance Score, which is explained in detail on RealBiathlon’s website. In short, it uses Ski speed, shooting speed and shooting accuracy in comparison to other athletes to eventually come to an indicator that shows if someone had a good race, disconnected from the actual results. It is important to know that a negative value is good, meaning faster skiing and shooting and better shooting. So remember: – = good

And we should also set some references on what is good and what is not so good when it comes to the Total Performance Score. Last year, globe winner Tiril Eckhof has a Totoal Perforamnce Score of -1.27. The number 30 ranked athlete, Dunja Zdouc had a score of -0.65, and the number 100 on the ranking (Federica Sanfilippo) scored +0.06. Tais Vozelj, the lowest-ranked athlete at 166 scored +3.02. For the men, the lowest and highest ranked athletes scored +3.44 and -1.41 respectively.

I wanted to see if there were athletes who have improved over the last 4 years, as well as athletes that were improving over the previous three years but had an “off-year” last season. To do I downloaded the last 4 seasons of Performance Score data on RealBiathlon and loaded it into Tableau Public to do my analysis.

As I only wanted to see athletes who competed in the last 4 seasons, I removed those who did not. Of course, this does leave some strong possible contenders for the new season (take Laegreid for example) but for this analysis, I wanted to work with a trend and for that, I would need at least 4 seasons.

Getting better and better

So which athletes got better over the last 4 seasons? With a simple calculation, we can identify the following athletes as ones that continuously improved since the 2017-2018 season:

To see who got the largest improvement over the last four seasons, we can plot the four years of Performance Scores on a horizontal line: the longer the line, the larger the improvement, and the further to the right the line ends, the better the Total Performance Score:

We can see that the biggest improvers are mostly in the lower Total Performance Score rankings, but there are athletes that have a high (but negative) Total Performance Score and have made a lot of improvement. The following chart highlights those athletes who improved more than -0.5 and had a Total Performance Score of at least -0.5:

For the men, nobody qualifies based on these parameters, but I would keep an eye out for Matvey Eliseev, Tero Seppala, Martin Jaeger and Artem Tyshchenko and see if they can continue to improve and as such start challenging for the top positions. For the women, as we see above, Marketa Davidova, Svetlana Mironova, Emma Lunder, Dunja Zdouc and Julia Schwaiger are all to be reckoned with if they can continue improving their Total Performance Score.

Off-year and ready to rebound?

Now let’s look at those athletes who were improving until last season, but then declined last season. This could possibly be a sign of further decline as an athlete is past its peak, but it could also mean an athlete just had an off-year and potentially coming out stronger this year. For this, I looked at the improvement athletes made in the first three years (season 2017-18 to season 2019-20) and the decline from last season compared to 2019-20. Then I also looked at their score last season, to exclude those that match the previous parameters but are very low on the rankings.

So the athletes that made a continuous improvement in Total Performance Score from 2017-18 to 2019-20 of at least -0.5, had a decline last season, and had a score last season of at least -0.5 are: