“I fired an 8 on the first shot.” These were the words my father wrote in his shooting diary 60 years ago today, on his way to winning the 300m Free Rifle event in the Tokyo Olympics and setting a new world record. For him, these words were a prelude to his triumph over a disastrous start.
For me these words came to represent something different and haunted me for two decades. They epitomized one of the great technical problems of the shooting sports. A problem many of us have seen, but few put into words.
Consider for a moment a leaderboard that ranks athletes by their average shot fired. Not hard to imagine as that’s how the customary leaderboards are programmed (including the default settings within the Rezults Leaderboard). An average shot fired ranking can misrepresent competitor standings in two common scenarios.
Ranking competitors by average shot fired is really only meaningful to spectators towards the end of the match when almost all scores are in. Both of these scenarios above are confusing to spectators at the start and middle portions of the match.
The shooting sports deserve better, and Scopos is leading with a solution.
Scopos is pleased to introduce a bold new way to project scores on a leaderboard by using the athletes known Score History.
Score History is Scopos’ powerful technology that allows athletes to track their competition and practice scores on their mobile phones. With it, Scopos maintains an athlete's average score based on past events. More specifically the average is calculated using public scores the athlete has shot in the past 12 months. With more recent events contributing more as do scores shot in more important competitions.
By combining an athlete's Score History (their average in the event over time), with the scores they are currently shooting at a competition, projected scores become much more accurate and meaningful to spectators.
At the start of the competition, an athlete's projected score is based mostly on their Score History, and only a small part on the shots they have already fired. As the competition progresses, a heavier weight is placed on the shots they have fired, since there are more of them to use. Near the end of the competition, almost no emphasis is placed using Score History, and instead a projected score is only calculated by their average shot fired.
In the latest version of Orion, Match Directors have the option to select from one of three projected score algorithms.
Match Directors can make this selection in Match Properties, under the Course of Fire tab.
The images below are courtesy of Gary Anderson, DCM Emeritus. They are previously unpublished, and are the first hand account of his 1964 Tokyo gold medal performance in the 300m Free Rifle event.
