In early March I wrote a piece about Wierer’s Pursuit efforts and results, and although I still stand by what I wrote it somehow felt incomplete. In the latest Extra Runde podcast, they brought up again that Wierer seems to do better when starting with a lower bib number in the Pursuit. It feels right, but I couldn’t find the data to support that for Wierer specifically. I did find that the later you start, the more places you can, and typically will, make up, but that applied to all athletes.
Then it struck me (yes, I’m a bit slow sometimes…) there was another way to measure performance in the Pursuit that could be helpful. Look at the Isolated Pursuit time, or in other words the “race time” – “seconds behind at start”. You can also call it the actual race time, and it’s a simple calculation: Total Time – Start Info. The latter has the time an athlete started behind Bib nr. one, the winner of the prior Spring race. Having this Isolated Pursuit time and the ranking of this time would show me her true performance of the day. Plotting that for the last three seasons gives me the following chart:
Now we can see if her start bib is higher her Isolated Race results vary between very good and very bad. Her races with a bib number higher than 15 though are all good to very good for the Isolated Race performance.
If we only take her 8 Pursuit races in the 2020-2021 season we can see she had her best performances when starting lower than 5th and two of her three worst performances when starting 5th or higher. I think it’s fair to say, although based on a small sample size, that the guys from Extra Runde were correct in their assumption. Starting later in the Pursuit races brings up the better performances in Dorothea Wierer. Now they have some data to prove it.
Data from RealBiathlon.com, Feature image from Manzoni/IBU