okansas.blogspot.com

okansas.blogspot.com
Occassional thoughts about orienteering

Friday, August 12, 2011

WOC starts...first look at peer nations

With the World Champs starting in France tomorrow, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a look at the teams from the peer nations. "Peer nations" are a group of countries that I use to compare. The group is:

USA
Belgium
Canada
Ireland
Japan
New Zealand
Portugal

I put the list together years ago. You can read about the method if you're really interested.

54 runners from the 7 nations are listed on the WOC teams at WorldofO.

The nations sent a total of 54 runners, and most of the peer nations sent large teams (8 or 9 runners). Belgium and Portugal sent smaller teams, with just 5 runners each. Barring injuries, we should see 5 of the nations have men's and women's relay teams.

I always like checking the ages of WOC runners. The average age of the runners from the peer nations is 27.7. You can look at the average ages of each nation's runners to get an idea of which teams are young and which are old.

The 2 youngest teams (based on average age)?

Portugal (24.4) and Belgium (26.2)

The 2 oldest teams?

Japan (31.7) and the USA (28.6)

The long distance qualifying race is tomorrow. Based on a quick look at the start list, I see 33 starters from the peer nations. It will be interesting to see how the qualifying races go and how many of the peer nation's runners make the finals. A few years ago I calculated a "batting average" for making the finals (the number of qualifiers/the number of qualifying opportunities). The averages vary by nation (with New Zealand having the best by a good bit). If you use the group batting average to predict the number of finalists, you get 3.6. We'll call it 4. It isn't my prediction, but it'll be a rough idea of what we might expect tomorrow.

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posted by Michael | 7:45 PM

2 comments

Comments:

Nice post. BTW, Italy is missing, do you consider it better or worse?

# posted by

MT : 10:50 AM

Italy fit in a group above the group with the U.S.

Estonia, Latvia, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Romania, Austria, Germany, Lithuania, Australia and Ukraine.

Michael

# posted by

Anonymous : 1:11 PM

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