USA, China and Russia Top Medal Counts,
Spain, Argentina, Italy and Ukraine Show Steady Declines
EMERYVILLE, Calif., April 26, 2016 – Gracenote®, the world’s leading provider of entertainment data and subsidiary of Tribune Media Company (NYSE: TRCO), is using its sports data expertise to predict which countries and athletes will step up at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games if the games were held today.
GENERAL – Australia has moved into fourth position in the Infostrada Sports’ Virtual Medal Table (VMT) after the inclusion of athletics and swimming personal bests since May 2015 took projected golds away from Germany and Great Britain and added four medals to Australia’s forecast total. Continue reading
ALPINE SKIING – Alexander Khoroshilov triumphed in the men’s Slalom World Cup race in Schladming to become the first skier representing Russia to win a men’s World Cup race.
FOOTBALL: Euro 2016 qualification begins this weekend and two of the top seeded teams in the draw, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Italy, are not the favourites to win their groups according to the Infostrada Sports’ National Team Ranking. Six of the nine groups have an overwhelming favourite to be group winner and only one of the groups looks truly competitive at this stage. We finish our analysis of the groups by looking at E to I. Our previous article analysing Groups A to D can be read here: http://infostradalive.com/2014/09/03/analyse-this-overwhelming-favourites-in-groups-a-to-d/
FOOTBALL – As we reported earlier this week, the 2014 World Cup has been termed the ‘Copa de Zebra’ in Brazil where zebra refers to results being unexpected. Although six of the 16 teams who have progressed to the second round could be termed surprising, there have actually been very few surprise results in Brazil and 14 of the 16 survivors had at least around 40% chance of reaching this stage. The only truly surprising teams in the second round are Algeria and Costa Rica.
FOOTBALL – Russia had two periods of greater offensive production before and after Algeria’s equaliser but failed to take advantage of this. Very little of consequence took place in the last 15 minutes of the match.
FOOTBALL – After two match rounds, Brazil remain as World Cup favourites in the Infostrada Sports’ Forecast with 24.5% chance of lifting the trophy on July 13. This has barely changed since the start of the competition but continental rivals Argentina’s chances are improving and now stand at nearly 18%. Germany are third favourites on around a 14% chance of becoming World Champions. The current chances for each team are listed below.
FOOTBALL – Group B rivals Chile and the Netherlands have been the most accurate of the 32 teams with their shooting at the 2014 World Cup. The Dutch in particular have been genuine sharp shooters with 21 of their 27 shots on target. However, there is reason to believe that this is not sustainable for the remainder of the competition.
FOOTBALL – At Infostrada Sports, we are always experimenting with new insights from sports data and we have therefore developed a balance of play visualisation called Wave which shows how the balance between two football teams ebbs and flows during a football match. Today’s World Cup match between Belgium and Russia is visualised below.
FOOTBALL – We look back at Belgium’s 1-0 win over Russia. Divock Origi became the first teenager to score at a World Cup since Lionel Messi in 2006.
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