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MID-SEASON
DEREK WALTON
Contributing Editor for the Master Skier
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Handicapping masters races is essential: there is no way a 75 year old can compete with a 35 yr. old. At present the time-honored system of dividing us into five year age groups is used, and I want to point out here that while the system may have the blessing of history, in practice it does not work very well at all.
To get some idea of how our performance changes as we grow older I have plotted the times/km. of the fastest among the men of the same age for the long free-style race in Finland last winter. The distances were 30 km, 15km and 10 km, but I have simply used the time/km. The results are shown in the chart.
What is remarkable are the abrupt changes at the end of most five year groups. My interpretation is this: elite skiers who are in the later years in the group probably feel that it is difficult to compete with an elite skier who is in his first year in the group, and are unwilling to commit time and money to travel to the event.
If this is true, then it really diminishes the quality of the event; nobody likes to feel they have won simply because the best stayed away.
A solution to the problem is to simply multiply each skier’s time by a factor that accounts for the age-related changes.
I have developed a simple template that works with Microsoft Excel: the correction factors are listed in column A, starting with A31 and ending with A85. To use it the race results are simply copied into the Excel file, the time converted to minutes and fractions of minutes, and then divided by A followed by the age of the skier.
The data used for the correction factors were very heavily smoothed results from the 1998 Masters World Cup in Lake Placid, and those shown on the chart.
If the participation in these events was indeed non-representative, this will tend to overestimate the corrections; so, at least initially, it might be wise to preserve the five-year age grouping, and just use the correction factors to handicap performance within each group.
Eventually, as more data become available, all skiers skiing the same event could be handicapped.
I would be happy to send the template to anyone wishing to use it.
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