In this post we shall use the JudoInside.com website again to explore a Judo competition and the data we are able to obtain from this freely available source. Today we shall look at the Tre Torri Tournament held recently in Italy, the event is a B tournament and was well attended and this event was choosen to look at as the British Team attended including many of it’s 2008 Beijing Olympic players.

We shall look at the men’s categories, not for any other reason than to save time, we shall not look at the female categories. Using JudoInside.com we are able to collect some data on the percentage of fights each athlete has won on an annual basis. This is data available on the JudoInside.com website on June 18th 2009, so is limited by the completeness of the information available on that site. There are some obvious anomalies  in the data, but for the purposes of this post we will just accept them.

So lets look at the raw data:

From left to right what this data shows is the number of fights JudoInside.com had recorded in the “Head to Head” statistic (including fights prior to 199). This is followed by the athletes name and then by the past decade of results. The results consist of a percentage of fights won by the player according to the website. The final column is an average of all the percentages from 1999-2009. Below the main table is a summary of the average percentage for each of the medalist types and also the number of fights recorded for each medal type.

The summary information shows immediately an interesting statistic, the winners of the categories had many more fights on the system than the players they beat, and this was consistent between second and third place winners also. This might be used to support a hypothesis that Judo success requires a certain level of competition experience. That without having competed in enough events you will not win.

This is only one data point and should not be looked at in isolation.
We need to consider the level of this competition, it is a B tournament, not an elite level competition, yet we have players like former World Champion Craig Fallon, Olympian Eaun Burton and of course Tamerlan Tmenov. The long contest record of Tamerlan Tmenov for example affects the averages. Francesco Bruyere and Tamerlan Tmenov are the only two players to have a record in each year for the full decade.

So lets chart the data above:

This is a bit messy, but if you look carefully you can see some interesting information about the athletes. For example, the density is clearly higher in the last 4 years, perhaps indicating the length of careers of players in this event. Comparatively few athletes have careers extending over more than 4 or 5 years. This information might support a hypothesis that there is a optimum length of career, which might become part of a long term athlete development plan if proven. If we were to simplify the chart or chart each athlete separate out athletes you might be able to determine trends in victory percentages, which could be used to assess if an athlete is progressing well or slipping perhaps.

After doing some simple analysis like this in a spreadsheet, it might be interesting to look at a variety of charts and see if anything comes to eye. A simple way to do this is to import the data into Swivel and let it’s automated system create some visually pleasing charts for us. And we can easily see for example the following summary of 2008:

Where we see that no athlete had an unbeaten year, and that the Italian player Giovanni Di Cristo was statistically at least, the best player in the bunch. We can also see pretty clearly in this next chart (below) which players are the most experienced.

This is just a quick summary of the event and yet it gives some insights that might be relevant to a coach of B Tournament level players, or even of an elite level coach looking to learn more about the players in the level below him and how they progress upwards (and in this case downwards). It could be interesting to researchers looking to discover more about our sport.

The data is available on Swivel, so please do take a look and leave a comment on this site telling me what you discover or find interesting.