2020–21 FIS Snowboard World Cup Puns

This is a sticky post listing all scheduled FIS cross-country events for the season 2021/2022.

Normal World Cup

This is my extremely biased opinionated review of the 2020/21 Biathlon World Cup season that just finished. It was an enjoyable season and unfortunately we all have to wait till November for the next iteration.

I am going to try to provide a review of the season, rank the top 15 athletes in terms of performance relative to expectations, and list some of my favorite races. This post covers a general overview and the women, and I hope to have a follow-up post on the men.

###A few short high-level notes

I start by thanking the IBU for being able to run a full season with all the uncertainty around the pandemic. Taking appropriate precautions meant that the participants remained relatively COVID-free and allowed us to enjoy exciting races on both the men's and women's tour.

That being said, the season was far from free from COVID-related impacts. Some notable examples include Lisa Vitozzi and Dominik Windisch never really getting their season together and the entire Slovakian team basically being excluded -- we never saw Paulina Fialkova reaching what we knew she was capable of. It also impacted preparations and we saw some relatively poor performances from many teams at the start of the season, which meant that teams which could train properly -- Norway and Sweden -- started with huge advantages. Ultimately, we won't really know how much COVID changed the results of the season.

The season was also notable for a lack of significant wind until the last world cup of the season (perhaps the one minor exception was the World Championships Women's Sprint). Oberhof -- usually a venue of wind and fog -- was actually fairly nice during the two weeks there. This meant that results tended to be less volatile, and certainly helped Tiril Eckhoff with her end-of-season domination (not taking anything away from her, it was an amazing set of accomplishments). With many expecting the Olympics next year to be a wind lottery, I think teams should invest significant resources in training in conditions where the wind is high and variable; Sweden did that for the 2018 Olympics and it paid off handsomely there. Well-resourced teams should also look into building real-time-during-the-race wind forecasting capability -- for example, this can let athletes know if they should just fire and go or if they should wait if there is a good chance of a lull in the next few seconds.

###On general team performance

Norway dominated both genders, much more on the men's side th

This is my follow-up to the same post for the women, which you can find here: https://www.reddit.com/r/biathlon/comments/maglmd/opinionated_review_of_the_202021_ibu_world_cup/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Before the season started, most people were expecting the men's tour to be a stroll in the park for JTB and the women's tour be a huge dogfight between many contenders from different countries. The women's tour turned out to be a snoozefest when it came to the overall due to Tiril Eckhoff's dominance, but JTB was not quite up to par and ended up in a huge fight -- before the last race of the season, he was technically behind in the "dropped 4 results total score"! In the end, he pulled through to win the Overall -- but we should be glad that at least one of the genders provided excitement. It would be fairly boring if the Overall in both genders was wrapped up before the last World Cup of the season.

As most people are aware, JTB's troubles this year stemmed from his own poor shooting performance -- it was no surprise if he missed his first prone shot -- but also from the rise of the young Sturla Holm Laegreid. Sturla started this season with only four prior WC races but promptly won the opening Individual with a perfect shooting score. It was to be a sign of what would happen in the rest of the season. Despite some small blips in performance after that, he never saw a real rookie performance drop-off: From the start of the World Championships to the end of the season, he won three individual races and was only out of the top 6 twice -- and those were 7th and 8th. In one of his interviews after wrapping up the overall globe, JTB mentioned training with Sturla and learning from him -- if those two can help each other with their deficiencies, you can expect another JTB and Norway domination season next year (can you imagine JTB's speed + Laegreid's shooting and calmness?).

Norway won every individual globe this year, but it was split between three people: JTB won the Overall and the Sprint, Tarjei won the Mass Start, and Sturla won everything else. With Johannes Dale also having a good season, Vetle Christiansen keeping his form (but still in a huge fight for his place in the team) and the huge pipeline of youngsters that they have (Norway's #8 would probably be