As we bid farewell to winter sports for the year, some athletes are wrapping club seasons all over the place.
People who read this blog probably know all about soccer and maybe basketball. But how about volleyball? Dozens of U.S. athletes are overseas — many of them making money that soccer players are not.
An NYT story on overseas volleyball introduced me to a neat site helping athletes share information and support. Athletes Abroad is a nice simple WordPress site that lets athletes connect and share stories, with other athletes and with fans. And yes, they’ve already spoken with the ubiquitous Yael Averbuch.
Best and worst from the week, mostly overseas …
Best recent success for a new rugby player: Kelly Whiteside catches up with bobsled medalist Elana Meyers as she tries her feet at rugby. A lot of running is involved.
Sharpest commentary: Snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler calls out Sochi for its environmental impact, particularly on birds, salmon, trout and bears.
Best speedskater: The Netherlands’ Ireen Wüst confirms it yet again, winning three of the four distances at the World Allround Championships. (Yes, she won the overall title.)
Best moguls skier: Hannah Kearney, for the fourth straight season, this time in dramatic fashion.
Biggest surprise: Switzerland beat Canada to win the women’s curling world title in a match that swung wildly in the eighth end, when Rachel Homan seemed to have hit a brilliant shot but watched her shooter spin away from the center back toward the front of the house. Switzerland’s Binia Feltscher converted her shot for three, then stole three when Homan missed a difficult shot in the ninth.
The Monday Myriad is a day late, and not just because we have so much to wrap up from the end of the Paralympics and the Alpine ski season.
Best and worst …
Best U.S. Paralympic day: A sweep in snowboardcross, Heath Calhoun’s first medal, bronze for Dancing with the Stars cast member Amy Purdy and a total of eight medals. (OlympicTalk recap | TeamUSA video)
Best comeback (in one day): Canada’s Brian McKeever was bidding to do an Olympic/Paralympic double on home snow in 2010, but he was omitted from the start lists. He held a gracious interview session with me and a few other journalists. In Sochi, the visually impaired cross-country skier fell early in the 1k sprint final but charged back for the win.
Best comeback (in a few weeks): The USA’s Shani Davis and Heather Richardson had a rough time in Sochi but finished strong World Cup seasons with the overall titles.
Best short-track performance: J.R. Celski won the 3,000 meters and finished second in the overall standings at short-track speedskating’s World Championships, while Jessica Smith took a bronze in the women’s 3,000.
Best first: Lowell Bailey reached a World Cup biathlon podium for the first time, taking third in Finland.
Best finish (past weekend): Ted Ligety needed a win and some luck to take that giant slalom globe.
Best finish (upcoming): Hannah Kearney won a dual moguls event to take a five-point lead in the World Cup standings over Canada’s Justine Dufour-Lapointe heading into the finals this weekend.
Best U.S. summer sport result: Gwen Jorgensen and Katie Hursey finished 1-2 in a World Cup triathlon event.
Most versatile athlete: The USA’s Tatyana McFadden swept all four major marathons last year in her wheelchair. This year, she’s a silver medalist in the cross-country skiing sprint.
Best ski finish: Watch Norway’s Mariann Marthinsen battle McFadden in the sprint final. (Same link)
Worst ski finish: Like Lindsey Vonn last year, Maria Höfl-Riesch had her season-ending injury and loud reaction captured on video.
Worst media slam: Veronica Campbell-Brown is angry that drug-testing cost her a few months of her career. It’s the media’s fault, apparently.
Worst of the worst: The stomach bug that left me unconscious most of Monday. Hence the delay.
Best events this week: The women’s curling World Championships continue (see YouTube for some live broadcasts), as does the chess World Championship Candidates tournament. Anand’s back!
Through three days of the Paralympics, host Russia unsurprisingly has a huge lead in the medal count with 24 medals, 7 gold. Tied for second with 7 medals is the USA and the inspiring team from Ukraine.
The U.S. track and field team ran away with the medals at the World Indoor Championships — 12 overall, 8 gold.
The USA’s week also included a redemptive World Cup weekend for speedskaters and more Alpine glory for Mikaela Shiffrin and Ted Ligety. (TeamUSA.org is also posting daily Paralympic recaps.)
Best and worst of the week …
Best event to watch Tuesday morning: USA-Russia in sled hockey.
Best Paralympic starter: Allison Jones won the first U.S. medal of the London 2012 Paralympics (in cycling). Then she took downhill bronze for the first U.S. medal in Sochi.
Best statement: The first 2012 Paralympic gold medalist from Ukraine, Olena Iurkovska, spoke proudly: “Every time I race, it will be for Ukrainian independence and peace in my country.” And she embraced a top Russian lawmaker at the flower ceremony.
Best bounce-back from Sochi: U.S. Speedskating medals in Sochi: zero. At the World Cup in Inzell, Germany, with most of the same skaters competing: eight. Heather Richardson won three races, Shani Davis and Brian Hansen each won one, Brittany Bowe had a second and a third, and Hansen added a third.
Best description of covering the Olympics: Canadian journalist Bruce Arthur offers the proper mix of humility and humor:
On one Wednesday in Sochi I got up at 6:15 on three hours’ sleep, was on a bus to the mountains by 7:30, covered slopestyle for seven hours, wrote it, ate a meal cobbled together out of apples and water and a cake-like yellowish thing with raisins in it, covered the half-pipe where Shaun White lost, ran out of the mixed zone and under the bleachers as White’s last run ended to get a Canadian cross-country coach on the phone after he’d given a ski to a Russian competitor, scrambled back, slipping on the snow, covered the half-pipe until White finally spoke around midnight, wrote one of the columns on the bus ride back down the mountain, wrote the other one in the Main Press Centre (MPC), missed the 3 a.m. bus, had a beer with a colleague in the media bar, caught the 4 a.m. bus, decided to have two more beers with the same colleague in the media village bar because at the Olympics you start to get punchy after a while, and went to bed 24 hours after I started.
Great day.
Best top 10: Not sure how much longer 2010 gold medalist Bill Demong will compete, but it’s nice to see him back in the mix in a World Cup Nordic combined.
Least necessary apology:
Hey friends, sorry it's taken me a while to update…I am just fine. I was knocked unconscious and had to have… http://t.co/HaDtbidYNA
Best World Indoor lap: Francena McCorory blew past and said goodbye in the women’s 400 meters.
Best hurled object at World Indoors: David Storl took the shot put lead, putting down the challenge for the USA’s Ryan Whiting. He responded with a shot that cut through the air like a meteor.
Biggest World Indoors upset: Nia Ali over Australia’s Sally Pearson in the 60-meter hurdles.
Most dominant World Indoors run, individual: Chanelle Price led each lap in the women’s 800 to win in 2:00.09, best in the world this year.
Most dominant World Indoors run, team: McCorory, Natasha Hastings, Joanna Atkins and Cassandra Tate won by nearly two seconds over a Jamaican 4×400 team that set a national record.
Best World Indoors win by someone I admit I’d never heard of: Omo Osaghae won the men’s 60 hurdles in a world-leading 7.45 seconds.
Most dominant multi-events athlete: Ashton Eaton was actually disappointed after winning World Indoors heptathlon gold. He didn’t break the world record. Poor guy.
And finally, the world record World Indoors win: Kyle Clemons, David Verburg, Kind Butler III and Calvin Smith — 3:02.13 in the men’s 4×400. At least, that might be a world record — we have a discrepancy of record-keeping.
That’s eight gold medals for the USA. No other country got more than five medals, let alone gold medals. But that was still lower than the projection at DailyRelay.com, which posted a lively in-depth recap of the meet.
Most compelling argument for change in the Olympics: This many slopestyle snowboarders can’t be wrong.
Most emphatic continuation of Olympic gold medal form: Wins for Ted Ligety (though he concedes he’s unlikely to win the season title) and Mikaela Shiffrin (who clinched her second straight season slalom title).
#Alpine: @MikaelaShiffrin wins Are slalom. At 18 years 360 days, she is the youngest woman in @fisalpine history to win 8 World Cup slaloms.
Most depleted World Championship field: Raising the age-old question of why they bother to have a figure skating championship one month after the Olympics.
Worst time to have a part fall off a rifle: OK, maybe the Olympics would’ve been worse, but you still have to feel for Susan Dunklee trying to shoot without a sight.
Can we really come up with a statistical model for projecting Olympic medals?
I’ve often joked that I want to be the Nate Silver of Olympic medal projections. But Nate knows a lot more about stats than I do — I never took a single class in the subject, and I just hack my way through spreadsheets on the basis of some self-teaching and the occasional journalists’ seminar. (Did I just ruin my chances of getting hired to consult at the new FiveThirtyEight?)
Since Sochi, I’ve embarked on a bit more self-teaching in spreadsheets and stats. At the same time, I firmly believe I’m hitting the limits of what stats can tell us about Olympic performance.
Check this prototype I’ve made for the Rio 2016 medal projections:
– Columns C through I are results from the Olympics, World Championships and the Diamond League. Obviously, we have a long way to go in this cycle, so many spaces are x’d out.
– Column J is each athlete’s personal best. Column K is each athlete’s best from the past season — for now, from 2013.
– I’ve assigned points to each of these columns, as you’ll see in the lower half of the spreadsheet. These can be adjusted without redoing a whole lot of work! If I decide to count the 2013-14 Diamond Leagues a little bit less, I simply change the point values in that chart. And I can duplicate this spreadsheet for use in sports that have different competitions.
So the point system is already bringing some subjectivity into the mix. I’ve decided to weigh the 2012 Olympics, the 2015 World Championship and the 2016 Diamond League more heavily than other competition. Then I’ve made a judgment call to assign points to times.
Then add another bit of subjectivity: Column N is an adjustment value. I can use this to account for any competitions missed through injury (Yohan Blake, Asafa Powell) or suspension (Tyson Gay).
Add it all up, and you have three columns that look scientific. Column O is “PI” or Predictive Index. (Yes, I said “Performance Index” on the spreadsheet – please ignore that.) Column P shows the percentage of possible points — divide an athlete’s PI by the “Max predictive index” in the middle of the spreadsheet. That number will rise throughout the cycle. When the 2014 Diamond League is complete, we’ll add 15 (the maximum value for Diamond League standings) for a total of 105.
Then Column Q is “odds”, a simple percentage chance of earning a medal in this event. I tinkered with a couple of possible formulas for this column. Perhaps I simply apply the %max column and adjust it so the numbers will add up to reality — you wouldn’t want four people to have am 80% chance at winning a medal, for example. Or perhaps I calculate how many standard deviations an athlete’s PI is away from the other contenders.
What formula is in there now? None. I eyeballed it.
That’s not a final decision. Perhaps I’ll figure out a statistically sound way to convert the PI into actual odds. But I’m not sure it’s really necessary.
We know Usain Bolt will win a medal unless he (A) isn’t healthy or (B) has a serious problem at the start, including a false start. The 100 meters, moreso than most events, is all about raw speed. Work up to 1,500 meters, and tactics become an issue — in a slower race, finishing speed is more important than a personal best over the whole distance.
I haven’t taken age into account, though I would expect the 2015 and 2016 results to catch anyone on the decline. But for now, I’m skeptical that Justin Gatlin will be in 2012 form in 2016.
So to make the 2016 projections, I’ll compile a lot of numbers. That helps, of course. If Nickel Ashmeade doesn’t improve his personal best of 9.90, it’s ridiculous to declare him a medal favorite. Yet when all is said and done, I’m going to leave some space for a gut feeling.
This isn’t a 162-game baseball season, where weather conditions and other factors tend to even out over time. This isn’t a presidential election, where substantial polling points to clear trends, and Nate’s success has shut up the pundits who didn’t get the math. This is a projection of who is going to run the fastest in one 10-second race.
I do hope to add some probability this time around. Usain Bolt (if healthy) will be much more likely to win a medal for Jamaica than my gold medal pick in some random judo weight class in which 10 people have a legitimate shot to win, and I hope my medal count projection will reflect this.
So I’m not afraid of a little math. I’m just looking for a healthy balance between the calculated world and the real world.
Olympic stats wizard Bill Mallon has quantified the host-nation bounce, showing that the country that last hosted the Olympics can typically expect to win roughly 70% of the medals it won at home.
The genius of this analysis is that it factors out the growth of the Games (particularly winter) by analyzing the medal count in terms of percentage of medals won. So if the Olympics add 30 events for 2018 (don’t worry — it won’t happen), then sure, Russia could match its Sochi record count. But the percentage of available medals won should drop.
When you’re projecting medals event-by-event, like I do, it’s difficult to account for this bounce. For London and Sochi, I’ve tended to break ties by favoring the home athlete. For London, I overreached, predicting 78 medals for Britain. They got 65. For Russia, I undershot, predicting 26 to an actual 33.
Some of the bounce comes from increased interest at home. Athletes on the verge of retirement stick around to compete. Federations get a bit more sponsorship money.
Some comes from home crowds. Some comes from those crowds affecting the judges. (Looking your way, figure skating folks.)
Brazil has revved up for 2016 with its best-ever medal haul in 2012 — 17 medals. They’ve been in double digits for the last five Games, with 15 in Atlanta 1996 and Beijing 2008.
In 2018, South Korea will surely improve on its total of eight from Sochi. Crowds at the 2002 World Cup turned an average soccer team into a world-beater, and they should have no trouble having the same effect on the speedskaters who underperformed this year.
We should probably dispense with the idea that Vladimir Putin timed the mess in Ukraine to occur after everyone left Sochi. Another wave is coming in right now for the Paralympics.
And while we in the USA don’t pay quite as much attention to the Paralympics as other countries do — though, in contrast to the Olympics, NBC’s networks will air the opening ceremony live and offer much more live action in the early morning hours — this is a large event that will be taking place under a large shadow.
As difficult as it may be to separate the geopolitics from the inspiring stories of athletes overcoming great challenges, we’ll have no shortage of the latter.
The daily recaps during the Olympics were so successful that we (I) have decided to revive the Monday Myriad, featuring the best, worst, funniest and most interesting news from the world of Olympic sports and elsewhere.
Most interesting upset: Afghanistan’s cricketers beat Bangladesh.
Best U.S. cyclist, perhaps with the exception of Katie Compton: We don’t pay a lot of attention to track cycling in this country, and yet Sarah Hammer keeps winning World Championship medals. In fact, we pay so little attention to track cycling in this country that it’s difficult to find anything about Hammer winning the omnium title without the headline “Trott misses out on omnium gold.” Britain absolutely loves track cycling, so if you want a full roundup, check out the Monday link roundup at Frontier Sports. (Which you should do anyway.)
Best “No, I’m not saying I should’ve gone ahead of Lolo, I’m just saying …” response: Katie Eberling, who lost out in the difficult choice of U.S. women’s bobsled push athletes, has decided to cast her lot as a driver.
Best U.S. biathlon result:
Another GOLD for Sean Doherty at the Youth World Champ Pursuit in Presque Isle, Maine @MaineWSC pic.twitter.com/LtrGUiaIMo
Quotes that probably seemed more humble when they weren’t in print: You’ll want to know the name Elizabeth Price, the gymnast who was an alternate for the 2012 Olympics and 2013 World Championships but is coming into her own now. She won the American Cup in my old stomping grounds of Greensboro, N.C., and said the following: “To add this title to a list of many, it’s pretty cool.”
Then this: “Hopefully I can soon say that I’ve won even bigger meets than this one.”
Most pointless doping case: Latvia may have to vacate its eighth-place finish in the Olympics if a second player is found guilty of doping. The first offered up the “club doctor gave me supplements — maybe they were contaminated” excuse, which is often true but not an excuse in the eyes of the IOC and WADA. In any case, the doping doesn’t explain how Kristers Gudlevskis made 55 saves against Canada.
Most irritating winter storm: Come on — not during the U.S. Curling Championships!
Worst house / best impression of the episode of The Drew Carey Show in which half the house is missing: Shaun White’s digs in Sochi.
Worst sports: German bobsledder Manuel Machata didn’t make the Olympic team. He loaned some his own equipment to Russia’s Alexander Zubkov. Germany, after seeing its own team flop while Zubkov won both gold medals, suspended Machata for a year.
Basically, I’m comparing three different types of results:
1. Majors: How skiers fared in the last Olympics and the last two World Championships. The number in “Majors” is a median — it ignores any null results, and the 2013 World Championships are counted twice so that they’ll be weighted more heavily.
2. Cup: Median of the last four World Cup seasons, with the last two counted twice so they’ll be weighted more heavily.
3. 13-14: The 2013 and 14 World Cups and the 2013 World Championships. A simple median this time, with no extra weighting.
Then for each skier, I calculated the difference between those numbers and his Olympic finish. Then I took the top 10 from the Olympics and calculated the absolute value of each difference. (In other words — I just want to know how far away from reality it was, so finishing four places higher than projected would be the same as finishing four places lower.)
So at bottom right, I took the median of each of the groups of differences. And that gave me a way of comparing which group of numbers was better for projecting medal results.
For the downhill, the 2013-14 numbers were better than the World Cup results, but the Cup results were much better than the majors. For the super-G, the majors were better, but I think that’s skewed by what I will refer to by a name I hope will catch on in statistics — the Weibrecht factor. That’s Andrew Weibrecht, who took bronze in 2010 and did little else in the intervening years before taking silver in 2014.
This is really too much to do for every event, but I think this exercise has pointed me toward a points system I’ll use for predictions going forward. I may do a few more winter events to refine the points system — it’ll have to be adapted for sports that don’t do World Cups and World Championships on the typical winter sports schedule, anyway.
But the next step, starting in a month or so — 2016. And we’re going to have easy-to-read charts of each athletes’ past performances, all leading to a predictive index.
First reaction to the idea of adding surfing to the Olympics, maybe with an artificial wave pool: “Hey, let’s see if we can make the Olympics more expensive to host! Maybe we can build more single-use venues!”
Wrestling had to fight to stay in the Olympics, and all they need from a physical point of view to host that is a gym in which they can put down some mats. Baseball and softball are out, and they only required some dirt and some bleachers. The post-Games use for those venues could be everything from more baseball to pastures for cows.
So in the current climate, with the Summer Games at maximum capacity by any measure, surfing simply can’t be added.
Key phrase: “in the current climate.” So we would need to add a wrinkle somehow, and that brings us to a radical idea I’ve kicked around in my head a bit.
Suppose you added another Olympics beyond the Winter and Summer Olympics. Or a couple of offshoot Olympics.
You could have a Modern Summer Games, adding skateboarding, roller sports and sport climbing while shifting a few sports lost in the current Summer program — trampoline and other non-traditional gymnastics, synchronized swimming, rugby sevens, etc.
And you could have an Ocean Games. Sailing is always stuck by itself, nowhere near the rest of the Olympic venues. Why not surround it with wakeboarding (which bid for 2020 inclusion), surfing and a few other ocean or beach events? Maybe have open-water swimming at those Games so swimmers would have a better chance of swimming in the traditional pool in the traditional Summer Games and then shift gears for open-water races.
The current Summer Games are far too big. The options are to cut them or spread them out. Those of us dreading the 28-month gap between Olympics would prefer the latter. So would surfers, surely.
In 2009, a handful of women’s ski jumpers took their frustrations to court, attempting to sue their way into the 2010 Olympics. They found some sympathy from the court, but the legal case was always a long shot:
(The court) didn’t rule in favor of the plaintiffs because the Olympic program is set by the IOC. With that in mind, Canadian law against discrimination can’t apply because VANOC can’t stage an Olympic ski jumping event without the IOC.
In theory, the court could find in favor of the plaintiffs and force VANOC to give up on ski jumping altogether, cancelling the event or moving it to another country. No one expects that to happen. The idea of the suit, Corradini says, is to force the IOC to add the women’s event to save the men’s event.
Though they incurred the wrath of condescending Canadian IOC-crat Dick Pound, women’s ski jumpers finally made it to the Olympics in Sochi. Then a few days after the Olympics ended, I did a massive purge of filing cabinets (long story) and came up with a folder that included the complaint in question — Sagen v. Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
So what happened to the plaintiffs in the suit? How many made it down the ramp in Sochi? Here’s a look:
– Anette Sagen (Norway; misspelled as “Annette” on the complaint): Dominant in the mid-2000s, Sagen was injured in 2012 and didn’t get back in form to make the Norwegian team. She went to Sochi as a guest of the Norwegian federation.
– Daniela Iraschko (Austria): Now Daniela Iraschko-Stolz, the 2011 world champion won the silver medal in Sochi.
– Lindsey Van (USA): The 2009 world champion hasn’t been in great form lately but finished a solid 15th.
– Jessica Jerome (USA): One of the leaders in movement to get ski jumping in the Games finished 10th.
– Ulricke Grassler (Germany): The runner-up to Van in the 2009 World Championships recovered from an emergency appendectomy in August to compete on the World Cup circuit and in the Olympics.
– Monika Planinc (Slovenia): Retired in 2009.
– Marie-Pierre Morin (Canada): No results in FIS database.
– Karla Keck (USA): Last competed in 2006.
– Nathalie De Leeuw (Canada): Last competed in 2009 World Championships.
– Katherine Willis (Canada): Retired in 2009.
– Jade Edwards (Canada): Not active; no results in FIS database.
– Zoya Lynch (Canada): Last competed in 2008 Continental Cup.
– Charlotte Mitchell (Canada): Still only 19; competed in 2014 World Junior Championships.
– Meaghan Reid (Canada): No results in FIS database.
Duresport.com 