It took Julia Simon two years to finally understand and internalise the teachings of Jean-Paul Giachino, who replaced equally successful Franck Badiou before the start of the 2020/2021 season.

Simon performed with 72% accuracy in the prone in her first season under Giachino’s tutoring and 84% last season. She has shot 75 times in the prone and cleared all but one target in the first weeks of the season! That strengthened her self-confidence, and she will go to the Christmas break as a Total Score leader, the woman in yellow.

We have analysed Julia's points at the end of Trimester 1 for this and the previous two seasons to see the correlation between her shooting performance and world cup points won per competition. We have used the new point system and adjusted Julia's score from the last two seasons accordingly.

She won 62 points per competition in Trimester 1 this season, compared to 32.1 points in the 2021/2022 and 26.5 points in the 2020/2021 season.

We then broke down Julia's shooting to the prone, standing, and combined accuracy. Her accuracy in the prone went from 72% in the 2020/2021 season to 84% in 2021/2022 and is currently at 99%!

Listen why.

Her accuracy in the standing went from 81% in the 2020/2021 season to 78 in 2021/2022 and is currently at 85%. Julia's combined accuracy at the end of the 2020/2021 season was 77%, a season after at 81%. It is currently at 92%.

We also analysed the change in her shooting speed from Trimester 1 in the 2020/2021 season - when she started to apply Giachino's input - until the end of Trimester 1 this winter. We can observe that her speed first increased and then fell dramatically - together with Julia's wavering confidence. It picked up this season again.

Data analysis and visuals: Robert Weise/Biathlon Analytics