okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Ireland's WOC versus the peer nations
Now that the World Champs is over, I looked at how Ireland did against each of the peer nations. I used my usual list of nations (USA, BEL, CAN, IRL, PN, NZL and POR) and calculated a win-loss record for the Irish runners.
Overall, Irish runners' won-loss record was 39-48. That's a winning percentage of 45.
To put that into context, in 2009 Portugal's winning percentage was 60. The other year's where I have winning percentages are all for the US and are:
You can break down the win-loss records by discipline or compare Ireland's men and women. If you look at the win-loss record against each individual nation, you can get an overall ranking of the peer nations. If you have a bunch of time, you could look at the winning percent for Ireland at previous World Championships.
A few things caught my eye as I was looking at Ireland's results:
The men and women had similar winning percentages (47 for the men and 41 for the women).
Ireland had one runner - Aislinn Austin - qualify for a final. She ran the middle final. She finished behind NZL and CAN (in fact, she was behind 2 NZL runners, but in my win-loss scheme that only counts as 1 loss). She finished ahead of the USA.
Ireland's men had a good relay. They beat all of the peer nations. Finishing ahead of New Zealand is an especially nice result. New Zealand is typically the best of my peer nations, often by quite a bit.
If you rank the 7 peer nations based on wins-losses, Ireland comes out behind New Zealand and Canada, but ahead of the other nations. That seems to be a pretty good result (and I think it would be better than Ireland has done in the past).
: 5:21 PM
