The winter olympics are coming! This is not a data science article, but those will come soon. Anyway, tt is an exciting time to celebrate our favorite sports and feel inspired to do better ourselves. It is going to be interesting this year with the doping ban for Russia as well as many unfortunate injuries and retirements. Figure skating is my favorite event because it is an incredibly beautiful and hard sport that I practised for a few years when I was young. It has been a sport in the Olympics since the first one in 1924 in Chamonix, France, and is often complained about because they are not measuring a time but are looking at technical and artistic components of the sport which can be very unfair. For a few years now Russian figure skating was always my favorite because their figure skating athletes are very talented, their artistic component is usually beautiful and their technique pretty much flawless. But I’m not sure how much success they will have this year because some of their best athletes left. I was very sad to find out that Yulia Lipnitskaya was retiring from the sport after an amazing win for Russia Team 4 years ago, she was especially great in her short programs. Adelina Sotnikova, who won the ladie’s event back then is a good candidate but might be shadowed by Evgenia Medvedeva who already won the world championships twice at 17 years old, if they accept to compete under no flag… On the mens’ side, Yvgeni Plushenko of course had already not finished the last games due to injury, and has also retired from the sport. France has a solid chance of winning the ice dancing event, with the Gabriella Papadakis / Guillaume Cizeron pair’s latest success, which I would be thrilled with. Canada is going to have a solid performance as usual, and we can expect great things from South Korea as well. North Korea is most likely going to send a couple so it’ll be good to see them. Synchronized skating is not yet included because logistically it is a challenge and also not that many countries actually have good teams but I but it could be there perhaps 4 years from now. I am currently looking through some figure skating data and analysing it using R, so you can expect that soon, and in the mean time the draft and code is on my github.
I am really looking forward to this event, and hope that the competition is going to be good! See you next time sciathletes!
Sciathlete