One million predictions for the European Championship
Using data to see who will get the medals
The European Championships are just around the corner and if there’s anything data should ever be used for, it is to make predictions about the future! Therefore we gathered all the data we have on the riders competing for the top 5 teams and ran them through our algorithms, and let the European Championship play out for us one million times!
Running one million championships is a great way to see how often different things will happen. We can start with some bad news for Sweden, only in 39 of the one million simulations did Sweden get a medal and only once (1 time!!) in million did they end up with a silver, and a 0 in 1,000,000 chance for gold.
Maybe something short about how it works? Well we have the history of each rider-horse combination and with some clever algorithms we can see how they would perform if they rode the championship one million times - giving us a range of outcomes for each rider that we can use to see how often certain outcomes will happen.
Somewhat (maybe) surprising there is a clear favourite for the gold which is neither Germany or Denmark but rather United Kingdom! With a 77% chance to win gold they are the runaway favourites for the team gold, at least according to the data.
Thinking about it, it also actually makes sense. Denmark is more or less fully out of the fight for gold as they are lacking Catherine Dufour this time around which has severely downgraded their output. Germany do have Jessica von Bredow-Werndl and she is what keeps them in the fight but there is a pretty big step down to her team mates in terms of scoring ability.
UK on the other hand have two really strong competitors in Charlotte Fry and Charlotte Dujardin. Given that only the three best scores for each team are used to determine the winning team, they just have more high-scoring riders than the other teams.
Looking further into the predictions we also see that Sweden and Netherlands are more or less totally out of the race for medals, with only a combined 0.5% chance of grabbing a medal. Sweden also suffered a late knockdown with Juliette Ramel not able to compete, and while Johanna Due Boje is a really good rider she is not likely to produce at the same level as we would expect Ramel to.
While Denmark won the team gold in the World Championships one year ago, they will likely have to settle for bronze this time, or maybe a silver. Carina Cassoe Kruth has shown really good form recently but without Catherine Dufour to back her up it’s going to take some immense performances by the rest of the team to challenge for better than third. However, they are still clearly ahead of Sweden and Netherlands so anything but a medal would be a big disappointment for them.
Hope you enjoyed this prediction, we’ll try to be back with more for the Grand Prix Special and Grand Prix Freestyle individual medals and we are really starting to get excited for the competitions to start!