NY Times Sunday article on Susan Von der Lippe

Paul, I have been working on a project in my spare time that relates to this. I remembered your post and wanted to show you that statistics sometmies is a good thing! I used the (statistically based!) performance rating system described on www.vaswim.org/.../rcalc.cgi and came up with the top 25 USMS swims from LCM and SCM in 2007. To make some attempt to preserve the table formatting, I put it in a text file and have attached it to this message (it works on Notepad for me). It only includes USMS members -- I got the performances from the Top Ten database. Susan does quite well, as you can see. In fact, if you assign points to places (1st gets 25, 2nd 24, etc) and then add them up, you get the following totals Laura Val: 236 Susan Von Der Lippe: 146 Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen: 144 Caroline Krattli: 74 Lois Nochman: 24 Sue Walsh: 14 Rita Simonton: 12 So SVdL comes in 2nd among US women. This omits SCY and non-USMS masters (it wouldn't be very difficult to include the latter, I just hadn't planned on doing so). Still, it is hard to believe that the 2nd best US masters swimmer is not one of the top 12 in the world. Chris...got any time to help me with my taxes this year?! :) I want to clarify again that I in no way was implying that any of the swimmers selected were not VERY worthy (believe it or not someone told LV that was what I had implied)...my point all along was that something didn't add up if Ms. Susan wasn't included. Thanks for backing up my "gut" feeling and let me know when I can send all my tax paperwork over!

Paul, I have been working on a project in my spare time that relates to this. I remembered your post and wanted to show you that statistics sometmies is a good thing! I used the (statistically based!) performance rating system described on www.vaswim.org/.../rcalc.cgi and came up with the top 25 USMS swims from LCM and SCM in 2007. To make some attempt to preserve the table formatting, I put it in a text file and have attached it to this message (it works on Notepad for me). It only includes USMS members -- I got the performances from the Top Ten database. Susan does quite well, as you can see. In fact, if you assign points to places (1st gets 25, 2nd 24, etc) and then add them up, you get the following totals Laura Val: 236 Susan Von Der Lippe: 146 Karlyn Pipes-Neilsen: 144 Caroline Krattli: 74 Lois Nochman: 24 Sue Walsh: 14 Rita Simonton: 12 So SVdL comes in 2nd among US women. This omits SCY and non-USMS masters (it wouldn't be very difficult to include the latter, I just hadn't planned on doing so). Still, it is hard to believe that the 2nd best US masters swimmer is not one of the top 12 in the world. Chris...got any time to help me with my taxes this year?! :) I want to clarify again that I in no way was implying that any of the swimmers selected were not VERY worthy (believe it or not someone told LV that was what I had implied)...my point all along was that something didn't add up if Ms. Susan wasn't included. Thanks for backing up my "gut" feeling and let me know when I can send all my tax paperwork over!