With three top 10s, sixteen top 20s and twenty-five top 30s in individual events, the 2020-2021 season was the best Canadian season in the last five years. After a dip in total World cup points in the 2019-2020 season, last season continued on the five-year trend of continuous increase in total world cup points:
So what did Canada do well to get here, and where is there still room for improvement? That is what the following review of the Canadian individual performances in the 2020-2021 season will analyse! In this analysis, I will only show some examples of Canadian performances, but a supportive dashboard with all used data for this analysis can be found on my Tableau Public page. It shows all stats for the Canadian team, both men and women, and has a second tab where a Canadian athlete can be selected to show his or her specific stats.
Skiing time
The skiing is still the area where the Canadian team overall can gain the most time. In the specific example below I compare the average ski times of the Canadian athletes to the field average, the average of the top 30 athletes, and the average of the top 10 athletes:
Although we can see Canada is closing up the gap a little compared to last season, we are still behind the overall average, and far behind the top 10 athletes. But the positive news is that we made great progress in the 2020-2021 season, indicated by the steep drop towards the averages.
Shooting time
This is where Canada has the least to gain (and the most to loose) as we continue to be very strong in fast shooting, leading many of the true biathlon nations:
Shooting accuracy
In previous seasons the fast shooting times by the Canadians often lead to less desired shooting percentages, but it appears the team and coaches are starting to find a balance between shooting fast and shooting accurate, demonstrated by both increased accuracy in Prone and Standing:
Shooting speed -vs- Accuracy
This balance between shooting fast and clean is of course the golden grail of shooting in biathlon (I wrote about this in more depth on this website in December last year). The chart below shows how this balance has changed for the different team, starting in 2016-2017 (thin line) and how teams have moved from shooting more or less accurate, and faster or slower. We see that in 2018-2019 team Canada put a lot of focus on shooting faster, which worked, but at the expense of less accuracy. Now we see that we have lost some speed (but are still very fast) but have gained accuracy. Hopefully, this trend can continue upwards towards more accuracy while remaining fast.
Individuals
The second part of the evaluation is looking at the individual athletes. All Canadian athletes can be viewed on the interactive dashboard, but here I’m letting Emma Lunder be the example here. We can see that here Accuracy -vs- Speed trend is similar to the Team’s and that she is gaining accuracy while giving up a little speed. But we can also see that here range, shooting and prep time (prep = range – shooting) is still very good and well below the field’s average:
Her total percentage of shooting accuracy (T) has increased mostly based on a strong increase in her prone shooting (P) and she well above the field’s average Total shooting percentage (T avg.). Lastly her skiing speed seems to have stabilized and is on par with the field’s average. But she is also closing the gap with the Top 30 and Top 10 averages.
Conclusion
As mentioned team Canada had a great season, as did Emma Lunder. The above will hopefully give a good explanation of how to read the interactive dashboard to see both men’s and women’s team performances for individual races, and the individual dashboards for any of the Canadian athletes. If the current trends continue and with some of the younger athletes coming through the pipeline, hopefully, we can some Canadian podiums in the next season! Go Canada!