Women’s Alpine Skiing World Cup GS Statistics
Motivation
In World Cup Giant Slalom (GS), there are two runs. Only the thirty fastest racers take a second run. If a racer is disqualified (DSQ) or did not finish (DNF) their first run, they do not take a second run. The order for the first run is determined by taking all racers and ordering them by their World Cup points, from highest to lowest. From that, the top 30 racers are put into three groups. The best seven racers are randomly assigning them a bib 1-7. The next eight best competitors are randomly assigned a bib 8-15. The next best 15 racers are randomly assigned a bib 16-30. The remaining racers go in descending order of points. For the second run, competitors race in reverse order of their results on the first run, so the 30th fastest racer on the first run goes 1st on the second run and so on. This data set includes data from only the top thirty finishers as any racers who placed higher than 30th do not take a second run. Since this data includes information on 2 runs by the same competitor (unless they DSQ or DNF on the second run), it allows for exploration of paired data. We can also explore difference in means between the 2 runs to investigate if racers are on average faster or slower on a specific run. Finally, we can investigate if there are any associations between run order and results.
Data Preparation
Data
Each of the 30 rows in this data set represents a racer, and there are 11 variables. There are a few missing values in the Run2_Time, Run2_Rank, Total_Time, and Rank_Diff columns due to racers not finishing their first run.
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | Name of the racer |
| Nat | Country the racer represents |
| Run1_Order | Start order for the first run |
| Run1_Time | Time for run 1 in seconds |
| Run1_Rank | Rankings of run 1 |
| Run2_Order | Start order for the second run |
| Run2_Time | Time for run 2 in seconds |
| Run2_Rank | Rankings of run 2 |
| Total_Time | Combined time of runs 1 and 2 |
| Final_Rank | Final results |
| Rank_Diff | Difference between run 1 rank and final rank |
Questions
Is there a significant difference in average time between run 1 and run 2? If yes, do racers on average go faster or slower on the second run? What could account for that?
Is run order for run 2 associated with final results?
References
The data was scraped from the following link: