Sunday, January 18, 2015

Emil Wingstedt tells about future of sport statistics in Orienteering

Emil Wingstedt is a great O-athlete with dozens medals from top-competitions, including amazing 8-years series of victories at EOC-sprints (2002, 2004, 2006, 2008). Emil explains his position about sport statistics.

Mike: All media successful sports has developed statistics arrangement.

In football you can see a detailed statistical info about every match: shootings, goals, passing, ball possession, distance covered by particular player, etc. Also it is easy to find info about meetings between different clubs for overall history.

In biathlon during race you can make monitoring particular athlete loops times, range times, shooting time. Immediately after the race you can see a new World Cup standing. Every athlete has detailed profile with shooting info, places in particular events (sprint, relays, individual, etc.).

In tennis you can easily follow match both by TV-picture and statistics about serving speeds, aces, unforced errors, net points, break points, 1st serve %, etc. Profiles are very detailed and include sums of total prizes amounts, ranking, detailed history of tournaments, etc. You can find very interesting information, let say, that Nikolay Davydenko is the only player who owns a winning head-to-head record against great Rafael Nadal.

Here are two questions about sports statistics in Orienteering:
1. In your opinion, what is the current situation with such statistical arrangement in Orienteering?
2. What kind of indicators, statistical aggregates, profile characteristics can we use in Orienteering (to make better information content in our sport)?

Emil: It's an interesting topic you're bringing up.

1. At the moment we have a poor situation with statistics in orienteering. On the IOF site you find only basic statistics like result list from WOC, and you have to search to find it. Worldofo has a better statistical archive with major event results and presentation of elite athletes.

It is, however, worth mentioning that from an individual athlete's point of view we have a very good statistical arrangement in orienteering. With software like Winsplits, 2drerun and the Doma map archive you can store and analyse almost every step you take in the forest and compare your performances against others. The amount of personal statistics you can derive from these systems is huge.

2. I haven't given this much thought. From a media point of view I guess the athletes' profiles at world of o contains much of the needed information as well as a good image archive. We all have to hope that Jan Kocbach doesn't loose his interest in providing and updating this information.

We perhaps lack a system for the athletes to gather all available information and present progress over time with relevant indicators, but I don't know what that system would look like.

Mike: Thank you very much for your interview.

P.S. Photo: Emil gives interview to NRK after his silver medal race at NM-sprint (2012). His eldest son, Liam, is looking at Papa.

 
P.P.S.Dear friends at the right side of your screen you can see a survey WHAT IS YOUR OPINION ABOUT PRIORITIES IN DEVELOPMENT OF NEW TOOLS IN STATISTIC/PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS.

Your opinion is important to set up priorities! Please, mark one or more points from list:
- Relay performance/skills
- Complete/detailed results overview, including historical statistics/ranking
- Statistics of different legs types 
- Pacing/speed analysis
- Safety/mistakes analysis 

Explanations and comments of these points you can read in the post Leonid Novikov tells about future of sport statistics in Orienteering.

Click button "ГОЛОСОВАТЬ" to VOTE.

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