Improvements in Total Performance Scores of regular World Cup athletes season-to-season. The last row of both tables shows changes in overall scores for the 2021–22 season compared to performances one season earlier (only athletes who appeared in at least half the races each season). You can do your own season-to-season comparisons for all stats in the Patreon bonus area.
Note: The scores are standard scores (or z-scores), indicating how many standard deviations (SD) an athlete is back from the World Cup mean (negative values indicate performances better than the mean). The Total Performance Score is calculated by approximating the importance of skiing, hit rate and shooting pace using the method of least squares (for more details, see here and here), and then weighting each z-score value accordingly.
Men
2021–22 z-Scores compared to 2020–21 | Non-Team events
Winning his first top 10 result this season, American Paul Schommer was the most improved male athlete, with career bests both in terms of shooting accuracy and ski speed. Vytautas Strolia also managed his first career top 10 this winter, coming second on this list, mostly thanks to skiing almost 2% faster than last year. In contrast, Martin Ponsiluoma and Sturla Holm Lægreid both underperformed compared to 2020–21, even though Lægreid managed to finish the season strong and repeated his 2nd place in the overall standings.
Quentin Fillon Maillet only improved marginally over last winter (1.3% better hit rate, 0.5% faster skiing), but it was more than enough to win his first Overall World Cup title comfortably. Johannes Thingnes Bø had by far the worst shooting stats of his career (82.1% hit rate, a whole 10% lower than only two seasons ago), however, he was still the field’s fastest skier and he delivered when it counted most in Beijing, winning 4 Olympic gold medals.
2021–22 z-Scores compared to 2020–21 | Non-Team events
Women
Jessica Jislová was the most improved athlete on the women’s side, skiing roughly 1% faster than last season and raising her non-team hit rate by 13.9% (among regular World Cup athletes, she was the 4th-most accurate overall). She is followed by Deedra Irwin, who managed the United States’ best ever non-team result in Olympic history, and Sweden’s Anna Magnusson, who got her stats almost back to her 2016–17 level, her career best season.
While Marte Olsbu Røiseland did improve over last winter (-0.2%), her performance uptick wasn’t as extreme as you might expect. Last year’s World Cup winner Tiril Eckhoff was worse, but according to this metric only marginally (+0.1%); in fact, her hit rate didn’t change much at all (-2.1%). Clearly, it’s sometimes more important when you miss your shots, not so much how you average out over a season.
2021–22 z-Scores compared to 2020–21 | Non-Team events
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