#despite this messy fht so far

[vierschanzentournee]

hii eve this feels weird

ok so this might be controversial (i'm saying might because i honestly don't know how u guys felt about the comeptition because the tag is still acting up) but i think the competition was pretty okay?? the weather was nice and even tho the wind was a bit shitty from time to time, the jury did a good job?

i was about to say something about eisei's style marks but quite honestly we have talked so much about it in season 2019 i think?? that i don't know what else to say besides FIS FIX THE SYSTEM!!!

now to karle, it was startling to see him so upset and i am not used to it at all?? i watched an interview and he was obviously so lost in his thoughts and he even interrupted the interviewer because she started talking about innsbruck - the poor guy had so much pressure form the media and i HATE THEM FOR ALWAYS EXPECTING SO MUCH FROM ATHLETES (if i am not mistaken there is a number of rants about this on my blog already i am not starying again)

BUT i do have to say that i respect him so much because another interviewer tried to push the idea of the jury being guilty and he imediatelly said that he was absolutely not implying that (another reason why i fucking hate some journalists i'm so sorry for the outburst)

ALSO LOVRO KOS MY BELOVED finally got his first podium and i can only hope that he will stay calm and collected for the whole season

honorable mention stephan with amazzing second jump and 10 place

excited for bergisel!!!! (my fave hill pls don't dissapoint)

i feel so powerful!!! how the tables have turned!!!

honestly, looking back i think the competition was fine - i'm a bit salty about karl losing the yellow bib, but frankly after today it might do him so good to have a break from the pressure of leading, and as @bronzebluemind has mentioned recently, he seems to do better attacking than defending sometimes. and oh man i am cut up reading that about his interviews - i don't really get interviews because the english broadcasting team is composed of david goldstrom and no one else, so the last i saw of him was him being very grumpy after his jump and then celebrating with markus (i have a gifset of it somewhere on my blog but presumably not in the tag lmao). i'm glad he's not blaming the jury for anything, it would not be a good look, and as you said i think the jury did fine today.

now that you mention it, the style marks controversy is pretty much the same as in 2019 lol. i think markus was definitely marked unfairly high for his first jump when compared to ryoyu, but also i don't think the overall impact was too severe; the stupid 18.5 from the german judge was eliminated, at least. i'm kind of glad he didn't win the competition frankly, just because there would have been a lot of people (on here, reddit, etc) who were very angry about it.

poor lovro kind of got lost amidst the drama of markus and ryoyu's battle! they never even showed his reaction to knowing he had a podium secured (after marius was 2nd after his jump). but this was awesome for him, and like you i hope that he'll keep it together and produce some more good results.

i can only say that i am terrified about what bergisel might do to karl (if he or anyone else gets hurt before the olympics......)

[vierschanzentournee]

Oberstdorf performance and Four Hills Tournament winners

Another day, another ski jumping statistics post which literally nobody asked for! Today marks the start of the 70th Four Hills Tournament, so I thought it would be fun to take a look at how previous tournament winners have fared at the first competition of the tournament in Oberstdorf - and, conversely, at the eventual fates of the jumpers who won in Oberstdorf. I’ve taken data from every season from 20/21 back to 06/07 — the reason I’ve cut it off there is that in 05/06, the overall Four Hills victory was shared by Janne Ahonen and Jakub Janda, and frankly, I couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to integrate that into my statistics. 15 years of data seemed reasonable enough! Have a look at what I found out under the read more.

So, let’s start by looking at the Oberstdorf performance of the eventual overall winners of the last 15 tournaments. Just in case you need a reminder, these are:

Kamil Stoch (20/21, 17/18, 16/17)

Dawid Kubacki (19/20)

Ryoyu Kobayashi (18/19)

Peter Prevc (15/16)

Stefan Kraft (14/15)

Thomas Diethart (13/14)

Gregor Schlierenzauer (12/13, 11/12)

Thomas Morgenstern (10/11)

Andreas Kofler (09/10)

Wolfgang Loitzl (08/09)

Janne Ahonen (07/08, plus others outside of this dataset)

Anders Jacobsen (06/07)

I started off by looking at the positions of each of these jumpers in the Oberstdorf qualification round. This quickly grew… messy. Six out of the 15 values for this were either unavailable (the FIS doesn’t seem to have documents recording the qualification results from 06/07 or 07/08), or the athlete in question did not start the qualification (in 20/21, Kamil Stoch and the rest of the Polish team were unable to participate in the qualification due to a positive Covid test in the team, but were permitted to take part in the competition; in 08/09, 09/10, and 10/11, the eventual winners of the tournament were pre-qualified for the competition due to their World Cup ranking, and chose not to participate in the qualification rounds). Therefore, I had only nine useable values for this, and these were extremely varied! In only two of the past 15 tournaments has the eventual champion won the Oberstdorf qualification (Prevc in 15/16 and Schlierenzauer in 12/13). A further two times, he has qualified second (Kobayashi in 18/19 and Stoch in 16/17), and Thomas Diethart qualified fourth in 13/14. Interestingly, however, a good first qualification is not essential in order to win the Four Hills, despite a poor result meaning a jumper has to face a more difficult opponent in the first competition round: Dawid Kubacki qualified a mediocre 13th in 19/20, Kamil Stoch could only manage 28th in 17/18, and Stefan Kraft qualified only 40th in 14/15. The average Oberstdorf qualification result of an eventual Four Hills winner over the past 15 years is only 11th — if Kraft’s 40th is treated as an outlier and removed, this increases to 8th. So don’t be disheartened if your favourite has a poor qualification in Oberstdorf — things are far from over!

What really matters, of course, is the competition results. For these, I have data for all 15 years, and what these data show can be boiled down to this: a podium in Oberstdorf is very important if you want to win the Four Hills Tournament. Only once in the past fifteen years has the overall winner of the FHT been someone who wasn’t on the podium in Oberstdorf —  Anders Jacobsen finished fourth there in 06/07. A victory is not essential, although it certainly helps, with six out of the past 15 champions securing their first win of the tournament in Oberstdorf. The other eight are split evenly between second and third places. If your favourite doesn’t make the podium in Oberstdorf, all is not necessarily lost, but you might want to spend the free day before Garmisch-Partenkirchen performing some kind of ritual to bring them better luck for the rest of the tournament.

This of course hints at the obvious, but still statistically striking, fact that consistency is absolutely the key to winning this tournament. I’ve collected the data for the other three competitions of the Four Hills as well (and unless life suddenly becomes unexpectedly busy, I’ll write it up over the next week or so as the tournament progresses), and so I was able to calculate the standard deviation of eventual winners’ positions in each competition (or rather, I was able to tell Google Sheeets to do it for me). Standard deviation is essentially a measure of how much variation there is in a set of numbers — if the standard deviation is low, the numbers are close together, and if it’s high then the numbers are more spread apart. Almost every single Four Hills winner of the past fifteen tournaments has an extremely low standard deviation in their competition positions: the two Grand Slam winners Kobayashi and Stoch naturally have a standard deviation of zero (because all four of their competition results were 1 - there was no deviation to measure!). A further six jumpers had a standard deviation of 1 or less, and almost everyone else had a standard deviation between 2 and 1. Only two jumpers had a standard deviation greater than two (that is, their finish position on average varied by more than 2 places). Stefan Kraft in 14/15 had a standard deviation of 2.2 (his results were 1, 6, 2, and 3, and just barely managed to win the tournament, leading his Austrian teammate Michael Hayboeck by just 6.0 points. Far and away the least consistent Four Hills winner, however, was Thomas Morgenstern in 10/11, with a standard deviation of 6.4, and finish positions of 1, 14, 1, and 2 — in his defense, however, the Garmisch-Partenkirchen competition where he finished 14th had no second round due to the wind conditions, and he got away with it because the conditions affected his most significant rivals after the first competition (Matti Hautamaki and Manuel Fettner) far more severely.

The next obvious question to ask is… what happens to the jumpers who win in Oberstdorf but fail to go on to win the tournament as a whole? This has happened nine times in the past 15 years: of these, six times the Oberstdorf winner has gone on to finish second, once third, once fourth, and once a measly sixth. The average overall ranking for an Oberstdorf winner is second; the average overall ranking for an Oberstdorf winner who did not go on to win the tournament is third. So rest assured that if your favourite wins in Oberstdorf, although it’s no guarantee that he’ll get his hands on the coveted golden eagle, it probably means he’s at least going to get to take home a decent amount of prize money and a shiny piece of silverware or two.