This is not meant to be anything personal against Steve, while I've only
met him twice briefly, he seems like a nice guy, but since the ESP guys
seems to be basing their arguments on Bob's margin of victory, and since
Steve has been the top non M3 finisher in all those comparisons except
one, I thought it would be useful to look at the history of events where
Bob and Steve have competed.
Going into altavista's search engine and putting in '"steven" near
"eguina"' I got the following:
ESP Bob Eguina
Pro Atwater '99 59.696 59.811 60.196
Pro Seattle '99 78.193 77.109 79.222
Pro Wendover '98 60.636 59.191 64.492
NT Seattle '99 75.573 81.955 77.215
Nats '98 106.295 106.705 107.421
Total 380.393 384.771 388.546
It looks like it rained in Seattle for the Tour, so qI'm throwing that
event out for the Bob/Steve and Bob/ESP margins. Someone on this list
taught me that it is perfectly normal thing to do with statistics ;)
With that being said we get:
ESP avg over Steve 1.631
Bob avg over ESP .501
Bob avg over Steve 2.129
So past history shows that the top ESP competitor has beat Steve by an
average of ~1.6 seconds, but Bob had been beating him by over 2 seconds.
If you look at this year's results, Bob is only beating Steve by 1.581
seconds on average.
So actually Steve is doing much *better* this year against Bob. Bob
you'd better go back to the BFG's and take off all those "changes" you
made after you found out you'd been moved to ESP, you are slowing down!!
Also Bob's margin of victory over Steve is less than the average margin
of victory that the top ESP finisher(s) had over Steve last year.
Draw your own conclusions,
Todd
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