In many sports, a sophomore slump is when an athlete has a great rookie year, setting high expectations for the next, only to see the achievements drop to a lower level in the second year. I am not familiar with the phenomenon in biathlon, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And specifically, it would be interesting to know if this will apply to Sturla Holm Laegreid after his amazing full rookie season last year. Can he keep up the pace or continue to challenge for the yellow bib, or can we expect to see a bit of a reality check in which he drops a level or two?
Selection criteria
I used Tableau to analyze all the race data since the 2010-2011 season and looked at all male athletes who had a similar start to their careers. I set the following criteria:
- The athlete was a rookie in the timespan between the 2010-2011 to the 2020-2021 season
- The atlete has at least one season with 20 races (individual races, team events were excluded)
- The athlete has at least an average of 10 World Cup Points
- The trajectory of the athlete is either starting with a (almost) full season, or starting with a few races in one season, followed by a full season after
This last criteria, unfortunately, played a big factor in excluding those athletes who switched between the IBU and Worl Cups. For example, it appears Germany typically lets their athletes participate a few races here and there on the World Cup and sends them back to the IBU cup in between. The Norwegians don’t appear to be on the IBU cup a lot, at least not until recently, and back and forth a lot less. Of course, every nation has its own way of bringing talents to the World cup, and this was impossible to consider when looking at comparable rookie seasons to that of Laegreid.
The following is a list of athletes who were rookie in the given timeframe with a similar trajectory as Laegreid’s:
Trends
Now the question is if we can see a trend in performance for these athletes. For this, I again use the Total Performance score as used in the previous article, and further explained on RealBiathlon’s website. Remember, with this score, less is more, or in other words, a negative value is good.
Generally speaking, we see a decrease of total performance score (so an improvement of performance) as the athletes careers progress after their initial full season. There are some exceptions specific to the second full season, like Babikov, both Gow brothers, Claude, JT Boe and Samuelsson, but those level out after that second year as well except for Babikov.
Conclusive?
Looking at the charts I think there is no reason to assume that based on previous rookie seasons the next season for Laegreid will get worse than last season. Now every individual is different of course, so there is no guarantee that he will get better or stay at the same level either, but I would be comfortable stating that in biathlon there is no sophomore slump to speak of, as we see in other sports.
If Laegreid can pick up his skiing pace just a bit and keep shooting the way he has been, I think he’ll pose many threats to the podium again in the upcoming season and beyond.