About a third into the season, I posted a dashboard with the current shooting streaks for Prone, Standing and Combined shooters at the World Cup level. Then, mid-January, Simon Eder got to an incredible 104:
And later the dashboard even showed him at 114 before missing the first Prone shot of the second shooting in the pursuit race in Antholz:
Fast forward to the end of the season. I update the dashboard with the latest data from Oslo to make a final version, and something doesn’t look right. More than one thing actually: Simon Eder is no longer the active athlete with the longest streak (which is kind of shocking, but true!), but the data seemed off.
Long story short: the IBU data from the great biathlon results page is missing some data; and for the 2022/23 season it’s particularly the individual shot data that’s missing for the pursuit in Antholz (funnily it appeared to be there before, but currently it’s missing). This of course impacts the streak data. Now there is some information still available, called the “shooting” field: it has values like 0+1+2+0, and depending on the race discipline I can still determine if an athlete was clean in Prone, Standing and Combined. But when not clean I cannot determine which shot was missed.
Let’s say Eder is on a streak of 70, going into a pursuit race. When all data is available I can see Eder’s shooting results like so:
In a pursuit race they shoot P-P-S-S, so I can add 6 Prone shots to his streak. However, for this particular race I only have the following data:
I now know that the first Prone was clean (add 5 to the streak), but for the second Prone shooting I don’t know which shot was missed, so the streak stops there, missing 0 to 4 hits in the streak.
With all this in mind I published a new and updated dashboard, where the reader should keep the above in mind. And that based on the available data, this is the best I can show.
You’ll find that Simon Eder’s record for the longest streak sits at 109, only to be surpassed by Justus Strelow, with a 114 and counting!
* Note: when I say longest, it is based on data from the 2017/18 season to last season, 2022/23. Any streak will have started at 1 from the start of the 2017/18, ignoring any ongoing streaks from seasons prior.