Hello speed skating enthusiasts,
Welcome back to Part 2 of this series. Continuing
from Part 1, we’re trying to figure out what we can learn from the best and
worst teams of the past five seasons. What type of team composition seems to
help winning teams win? And what mistakes do losing teams appear to be making?
Today, we’re going to be talking about sex. Mostly about
the “sex” as in male and female skaters, but also a little bit about the “sex” that
naughty skaters occasionally partake in during their private time.
Sex Part 1: Does the sex of your skaters
matter?
Most teams are a mix of men and women. No team has
ever won money in this league without representation from both sexes. To be
exact, the average winning team drafted 4.6 women (very close to half of a team of
10). Similarly, no team has ever finished in the bottom five with an all male
or female team.
Breaking things down season by season, how
many female skaters were drafted by the top/bottom five teams in each of the
past five seasons
?
Figure 1: Number of female skaters picked by the best and worst teams, 2018-2022
What immediately jumps out is that the best and
worst teams seem to pick a similar number of women during seasons with less total
points up for grabs, but when there are more events the best teams are picking
more women.
For example, 2022 featured only a single 500m event
per World Cup and had no World Sprints/Allrounds. The winning team scored 2335
points. In 2020, the season was very short due to COVID and feature only three weekends
of racing. The winning team scored 977 points. In 2018, the winning team scored
2466 points. These three seasons saw the number of women picked by good and bad
teams stay within two.
On the other hand, the 2021 season featured 2x 500m
events at each World Cup as well as World Sprints/Allrounds at the end of the
season. The winning team scored 2825 points. 2019 was very similar to 2021,
with more than one 500m event per weekend and World Sprints/Allrounds. The
winning team scored 2845 points. These two seasons saw the difference in number
of women picked by good and bad teams stretch to seven and five respectively.
I actually find this very interesting. Generally, the top women are seen as more
consistent. Rarely do we see women ranked 10th-20th in a distance land on a
podium (compared to the men’s 1000 which has someone new on the podium
practically every week). If women are better at consistently getting big
points, then longer seasons with more points up for grabs should favour female
skaters. Two 500m events at every World Cup? Consistent female skaters see a
nice increase in value. World Sprints/Allrounds? Consistent female skaters see
a nice increase in value. It's not that the male skaters don’t also go up in
value when there are more points up for grabs, it’s just that there are fewer
consistent points earning skaters on the men's side.
Figure 2: Is the men’s 1000m competitive?
The current Men’s 1000m rankings suggest the answer is "yes".
Red circles indicate skaters with a 1000m podium
finish in the past 14 months. Should anyone currently ranked 20
th
or
lower be on this list? Only a couple of scrubs, including Krol, Otterspeer,
Dubreuil, Dijs, Gelinas-Beaulieu, Wennemars, and Kersten...
So, we’ve found that the best teams seem to be picking
more women during seasons with more total events, but is this really the most
important finding regarding sex? The answer to that is a resounding “no”. As
shown in Fig 1, the top teams picked 108 women over the past five seasons (47%
of total picks) while the bottom teams picked 98 (42%). Not a huge difference,
but noticeable (especially during longer seasons). But when are these teams
picking their women? For top teams, over 60% of their female skaters are picked
in the first half of the draft. For the bottom teams, that number falls to just
under half. So, does it matter when you draft your women? It turns out this is
actually more important than picking the right balance of male and female
skaters.
The vast majority of teams that land on the podium each
season draft at least three women in the first four rounds, and only one team
has outright won the league without meeting the 3 of 4 threshold (congrats
Ryan). On the other side, only two teams have ever drafted three women in the
first four rounds and still finished in the bottom five of the league. One of
these two teams was Laxton's 2018-2019 roster that included a RETIRED Marrit
Leenstra along with a host of other braindead picks so I think that roster had bigger issues setting it back.
I can already hear Stepdad drunkenly yelling into his
monitor that these stats sound incredibly cherry picked, so lets back this up
with some numbers. Since 2018, top teams have drafted an average of 11.4 women
in the first four rounds (out of a total of 20 draft slots, so 57%). 2018 appears
to have been a bit of an outlier (only 7 women drafted in the first four rounds)
and since then the average has been 12.5 women, or 63%. Over the same five-year
period, bottom teams drafted an average of 8.6 women in the first four rounds
(43%). If we take out 2018 again, then that bumps up a bit to 9.25, or 46%.
As the numbers show, the best teams are picking significantly
more women in the first four rounds of the draft than the worst teams.
Additionally, if we compare the percent of top teams’ picks in the first four
rounds that are women (63% since 2019) to the percent of total draft spots that go to women (47%), the difference is stark. Women, who make up the minority if active
skaters on good teams, are overrepresented in the first four rounds of the
draft. This is still true for bad teams, albeit with lower numbers and a smaller gap (46% of picks
in rounds 1-4 are women, compared to 42% for their teams.
So what does this all mean? Picking women early and then
picking men late seems to be the golden combo. Considering that the top women
are almost all competitive in at least two distances (and potentially as many as five distances at WSD), it makes sense that many
of the top picks are women. On the other side, the men’s field usually feels
deeper and lower ranked skaters have more potential to land on a podium or two to score some big points for their teams (for example, see Fig 2). Now, this
doesn’t mean you should pass over Patrick Roest, Bart Swings, or Jordan Stolz in
the first four rounds just because they’re dudes. Top teams are still selecting
men with about a third of their picks in the first four rounds. But next time
you’re considering picking Krol or Murakami or Ning or any other male skater that is
good but isn’t necessarily a consistent, super elite multi-distance skater, maybe
take a second to consider which options are still available on the women’s
side.
Sex Part 2: How much sex are your skaters
having?
This question was actually quite hard to look at
properly. I started by asking every skater on the World Cup circuit to fill out
a daily questionnaire that asked how much sex they had each day. After getting
very, very, very, very few questionnaires back from athletes (thank you to both
Kjeld Nuis and Andrea Giovannini for getting back to me), I decided this
strategy wouldn’t work.
Without athletes answering my questionnaire, how can we
tell if an athlete is having sex? Luckily, I thought of a genius way to accurately
answer this question. It goes as follows: athletes with at least one kid =
athlete is having sex, while athletes with zero kids = athlete is not having
sex. Nice, simple, logical, and essentially impossible to argue against.
Using our new definition of “has a kid = having sex”,
I went through the past few seasons to see how much sex the best and worst
teams were having. Last year’s five worst teams had eight skaters having sex. Last
year’s five best teams had only four. Over the past three seasons, the five worst
teams have drafted a whopping 25 skaters having sex. The best teams over the
same period? A measly 11 skaters having sex, and never more than four in a
single season. That’s less in three seasons than the incredible 14 skaters who
have sex that the worst teams drafted in the 2020 Draft alone.
One could argue that our definition of having sex is
selecting skaters that not only have sex but also have to take time off
training/competing to take care of a child (or possibly even give birth to a
child). While this appears logical at first glance, this argument is clearly
twisting the data’s rubber arm a bit too much. You think Kjeld is spending so much
time taking care of his kid that it’s negatively effecting his performance? You
think Spence was some kind of super-duper father figure who was involved with his
children early on? You think Lalenkova was still busy giving birth eight years
after her only child was born? Absolute nonsense.
I think the results are clear. Bad teams have sex 2-2.5
times more than good teams. You want to win in this league? Stop drafting those
sex-having skaters!
I’ve got a couple final variables to go over, but
since they’re thematically much closer to each other then they are to sex-talk,
I’ll end this post here and save them for next week. The final installment of
this three-part series will likely be out in the next day or two. Until then,
you’ll have to get your skating fix by watching the 4 Continents Championship,
which is thankfully much better than it’s ever been before.
Cheers,
Dad