FWT Data Analysis

The FWT Data Analysis Project

(side-left) Astrid Cheylus, winner at the Val Thorens Pro 2025.

In Autumn 2019, I undertook a large data scraping & analytics project aiming to get some insights into the long term performance of Ski Men athletes participating in the Freeride World Tour. I collected 15 years of competition results, some through the FWT website, but many manually by re-watching “vintage” competitions. The following are some of the results as well as the main questions I sought to answer.

1. How varied is the judges scoring by venue, are there venues which tend to have much higher/lower scores?

Venue point distribution, 2015-2019 [width:650px].

Yes! Some venues, like Verbier or Kicking Horse, tend to have significantly higher point distributions compared to places like Chamonix, Fieberbrunn, and Hakuba. Certainly interesting is also the variance of the results, with Haines Alaska being the most “compressed” field. Finally, in our sample Kicking Horse is the only venue where +90 scores have occurred a few times.

2. Given that riders can compete for 1 season, or nearly 10, who are some of the most productive skiers as shown by their career results?

“Relation between Mean Position and Number of Appearances (2004 - 2019)[width:300px].”

Yes! Two skiers at that time were statistical anomalies, American Drew Tabke and Swede Reine Barkered both exceeded 40 appearances, and maintained a mean finishing position around 10th place. Reine’s track-record up to 2019 was incredibly impressive with over 50 events and a mean finishing position within the top-10.