Brian Halligan had a great video post about the shooting streak by Simon Eder. I encourage you to have a look, and check out his other content as well. If you’re into biathlon, I guarantee you’ll like it.
It reminded me of a post I wrote last year about Eder’s streak. Only I just realized I never published the post! As it also stopped after race weekend 5 of the last season, I updated the data and republished it to Tableau Server. The main difference with Brian’s approach is that I did not include Relay races, which explains why his streak has 10 more hits. Other than that, here are the visuals of the report:
On the horizontal axis, we see from left to right the date of the shooting, per shooting, per shot. On the vertical axis we see the streak: if the shot was a hit it goes above and slightly to the right of the previous shot, a miss resets the streak back to zero. We can see that Simon Eder’s streak is far beyond anything that any other athlete has done, with Martin Fourcade, Mikita Labastau and Sturla Holm Laegreid 23 or more shots behind.
When we remove all the clutter and only look at Fourcade, Laegreid and Eder, we see that Eder also has a large number of smaller streaks, of 46, 39, 25 and 24, and some lower ones. Closest to him of the active athletes is Laegreid, and considering he just finished his first full IBU World Cup season, it would be interesting to see if he can improve his shooting even more to challenge Eder for the streak of 89!
Below the data is shown per individual shot in a slightly different format, with data from last season and for Simon Eder only. His streak of 89 clean shots stands out by colour: the more blue the shot, the longer the streak.
What do you think? Can anyone, including Eder, ever challenge the streak of 89 (99 if you include Relays)?