Let's have a look at women's World Cup results aggregated by nation. If you didn't know how FIS calculate Nations Cup points, and maybe you don't, which nation would you guess won the title this year?
Maybe you'd guess Italy, the Italian women had by far the most victories (11) and led all nations in podiums with 20. Or maybe you'd guess Switzerland, who finished with more top 10s than any other nation (73). But, you might be surprised to learn that Austria won the women's Nations Cup title this season.
So how did Austria manage to grab the Nations Cup title? If you notice, they had the most racers and those racers made the most starts. Austrian women started 301 races this season, 12% more than the Swiss and competed in 51% more races than the Italians. The Austrian women did it with depth and more specifically scored the most points from 11-30th place finishes. While the Nations Cup is a team award and depth is admirable, can anyone really ague that the Austrian women were the best team this season?
This isn't an isolated case. I went all the way back to the 1982 season, Austria has won the men's Nations Cup 34 times, the Swiss have won it 7 times. No other nation has won the cup during this period! The women's Nations Cup has actually been more competitive, the Austrian women have only won it 26 times, the Swiss 9, and three other nations have won it at least once include the American women all the way back in 1982! The overall Nations Cup (men & women combined) has been won by Austria 33 times, the Swiss have achieved victory on only 8 occasions. This includes a 30 year period of Austrian dominance from 1990-2019.
I don't mean to pick on the Austrians, and there have been many seasons where they were truly dominant. But, it would be more fun if more nations could make it a realistic objective. Let's look to cycling for a potential blue print. In the Tour de France, while there are 8 or 9 riders per team, only the times of the top three riders in each stage are used to calculate the team classification. While there's a lot of team dynamics and strategy at play in cycling that aren't relevant to skiing, the idea of counting the same number of athletes from each team/nation toward a team classification has a lot of merit. One way to do this is similar to cycling, where for the team classification you would count the top three cyclers/skiers per team/nation each stage/race. But for the purposes of this discussion let's do a scenario analysis. What would the Nations Cup standings look like if we included only the highest scoring half dozen athletes from each country?
Why a half dozen? On the men's side, every country in the nations cup top ten had at least eight athletes racing World Cup. On the women's side, of the top thirteen nations, only Slovakia had less than six athletes.
To further illustrate how crazy the current system is let's take a look at the men's side. The Austrian men actually would've won the men's Nations Cup this season but for the season ending team event in Meribel.
In the week leading up to the team event, in a stroke of genius, the Swiss trained a bunch of mostly European Cup athletes for team parallel starts and managed to beat the exhausted/indifferent lineups of veterans that other nations fielded for the event. This earned the Swiss 400 Nations Cup points (200 per gender), the 40 point difference between them and the Austrians (who finished 2nd in the TE) was enough to steal the men's Nations Cup! A fantastic drama for the final day of the season! But did anyone notice or care? Should it have even been that close?
The answer on both accounts is probably no. The Austrians had the fewest wins of the three top nations and four few podiums than the Swiss. But, had there been bad weather on the day of the team event in Meribel, forcing cancellation, the Austrians would have taken the men's Nations Cup as well!
How is this possible? Well let's look at the data in a slightly different way that we did with the women. Look at the team points category for each nation. How many skiers deep do we need to go before the Austrians overtake the Swiss? It's skier twenty! What's their breakeven compared to the Norwegians? Skier nine, it takes the contributions of Johannes Strolz to overcome the attacking vikings. The Norwegians only had twelve skiers score points on the season. The Americans had ten, the Canadians had eight scoring athletes.
So, as on the women's side, the Austrian men did it with depth. As the Nations Cup is currently structured, before the first athletes kick out the gate in Sölden only two nations ever have a chance to win the overall. The Austrians are winning year after year and often it's because their second dozen athletes of each gender are able to score World Cup points. I'd argue this is fundamentally unfair. The Austrians already have the substantial advantage of entering more athletes in each race. So they have more opportunities to get results. And rightfully so, they fund larger programs than the other federations. But when it comes to the team awards we should be comparing the same number of skiers.
I'm open to different models. Whether it's be the cycling model of scoring only the top three athletes per team in each race or if we total season ending points based on each nation's top X number of skiers. Adopting any of these proposals would be both more entertaining and more fair.
Let's revisit the alternative reality where we determine the Nations Cup by adding the season ending points of each nation's top six skiers. This is what the results would've looked like.
Doesn't this fit more with the eye test? The Swiss showed at the Olympics they were clearly the best team. Here they win the men's and overall titles. Let me know what you think.
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