Does anyone understand the USAT rankings?
all I know is that they hate me.
With respect to what?
I’m not trying to be flippant, just that USAT rankings are a relatively complex beast. I also wouldn’t stretch to suggest I know all the nuances of the rankings, but I have a general/functional understanding of their design.
The rankings are fully explained on
http://www.usatriathlon.org/Rankings/rankings_intro.htm
It’s not perfect, but it’s very difficult to rank athletes competing on different courses over different distances, in different conditions, with different competition etc, and this system makes a decent attempt to do just that.
However, here’s what I don’t understand …
Our personal rankings are currently available on the USAT website, i.e. we can each see our score, a number between about 50% and 100%. So why do they make us wait until the end of January before publishing the age-group lists? Surely someone just runs a script to generate the age-group results, so as to see who got All-American, who got Honourable-mention, and who got outranked by a lady in 65-69. The season will be over in a month, why can’t USAT give us the information then. Or give us intermediate results now?
So it is a percentage. 100 would be the best.