Who, What, and How Are Points Being Scored At 57kg: Part 2

It's worth repeating: My goal is to run through the 2019 World Championships in its entirety and see who, what, how, and when points are scored at the highest level of the sport. I’m going to start with the most meaningful rounds of the tournament: the quarters, semis, repechage, and medal rounds. This will give me the ability to look at how trends present themselves in different weight classes. Once I get a good collection of data from each weight class, I’ll go back and add in the round of 16, round of 32, and the qualification round. The questions that I hope to answer in this series are as follows:

What - What tech and what position is scoring the most?

Who - What athletes from what countries are using which tech to score?

When - What technique works in what rounds?

How - Which setups, and which ties are being used to get to the scoring tech, and which finishes are used the most?

Yesterday we spent some time looking at just how the athletes at 57kg scored points; today we're going to see who these athletes are, what country they represent, and in which rounds they score the most. 

It's very easy for me to get caught up in the minutia of information collection, so sometimes when I start doing these data-heavy pieces I have to stop and remind myself of the main objective. The idea, especially in regards to giving you who is scoring and when, is more about game-planning for a particular opponent and how we look at it. 

For example, I'm going to give you the amount of points that all of the athletes scored in the meaningful rounds of this particular World Championships, but the stat that is probably more valuable is the average points scored per match. Why, you ask? Because then you have an idea, as a coach, as to how many points you will have to score to beat that person. 

Your Medalist

• Gold medal - Zavur Uguev, RUS, 20 Points
• Silver medal - Suleyman Atli, TUR, 11 Points
• Bronze medal - Kumar Ravi, IND, 15 Points
• Bronze medal - Nurislam Sanayev, KAZ, 17 Points

The Rest Of The Field

• ATRINAGHARCH, IRI, 7 Points
• MICIC, SRB, 7 Points 
• TIGREROS, COL, 6 Points
• ERDENEBAT, MGL, 4 Points
• TAKAHASHI, JPN, 1Point

Hopefully it doesn't come as a shock that the athletes that score the most points are the ones that bring home hardware. I love that UWW has put the emphasis on scoring points; the sport has grown because of it. If you took the same data from the ball draw era I have doubts that the medalist would have the highest point total. 

Highest Averages

All four of the medalists at this weight happened to only have three matches in what we're dubbing the "meaningful rounds" of this tournament. If, for example, the athlete that lost to the eventual finalist in the quarterfinals would have won a bronze medal he would have one more match in the repechage. 

• UGUEV, RUS, 6.67
• SANAYEV, KAZ, 5.67
• RAVI. IND, 5
• ATLI, TUR, 3.67
• ATRINAGHARCH, IRI, 2.33
• MICIC, SRB, 2.33

While I realize ranking the athletes by their average doesn't change the order, what it does is give you a jumping-off point when you're training athletes. You know that going into a match with a guy like Suleyman Atli from Turkey that if you score one four-point move it will probably be good enough for the win, whereas wrestling Sanayev from Kazakhstan will require a slightly higher point output in order to get your hand raised. 

Sometimes you have to dig a little bit deeper into these numbers. For example, Uguez has the highest total and the highest average, but what the numbers don't tell you is that the majority of those points were scored in the finals vs Atli. As a matter of fact, more than half (12) of Uguev's points were scored in the finals, and eight points came from one sequence on top. So there are a couple of different ways you can look at this: 

1. Uguev's average is inflated and it may take fewer points on average to beat him in the future, but we'd need more data to confirm that. 

2. Russia shows up in the finals.