Trackt: showing athletes exactly how far they are from qualifying

[Kota]

Hi everyone

I’m Kota. I had a great call with Andy this week — turns out we’re both 800m runners, a couple of decades apart — and he suggested I introduce myself and a project here.

Quick background: I ran 800m professionally for a few years after university, then coached pro athletes in Japan, and I’m now based in Australia. I’m not a developer by training — my world is the athlete and coach side — but I’ve been building a tool to solve a problem I kept running into on both sides.

The problem. World Athletics publishes rankings, but they’re genuinely hard for an athlete to act on, for two reasons:

• The number you see isn’t your real position. With the country quota (max 3 per nation), an athlete shown at, say, world #45 can actually be much closer to — or further from — a qualifying place once you strip out the athletes who’d be cut by their national limit.
• Even once you know your rank, nothing tells you what to do about it: how many seconds you need, or how many places you’d have to climb, at which meeting.

What I’m building (Trackt). You search your name and see where you actually stand — adjusted for country quotas — and exactly how far you are from the line, in both time and ranking position. It turns the ranking list into a clear, personal “here’s your gap, and here’s what closes it.”

An athlete’s page: current world ranking and the exact gap to the qualifying line — in both time and places.

Quota-adjusted view: recalculating an athlete’s true position once the max-three-per-country rule is applied.

It’s built for international use, not just Japan. I haven’t come across anyone doing exactly this — but this is the right room to ask: has anyone here explored quota-adjusted rankings or athlete-facing qualification tools? I’d really value your eyes on it.

One thing that struck me talking to Andy: Japan does have sites for national rankings, but nothing that shows an athlete their World Athletics ranking position — or how far they are from a global qualifying place — in a usable way. For that, athletes are sent to the WA site, which only carries world-calendar meets. That gap is part of what Trackt is for.

Andy mentioned there might be an online meetup around August — I’d love to present this properly then. Until then, any feedback is hugely welcome.

Thanks for having me,
Kota

Trackt - 陸上競技 世界ランキング検索

[andyrobinson]

Thanks, @Kota . You are very kind - I am sure the gap is more than 2 decades

There are ways to query world athletics’ API if one has permission, granted normally to countries or to competition organisers, and thus retrieve a current world ranking position. But the request would have to come from whoever’s best placed to handle digital matters in JAAF. I’d be happy to facilitate if I can

[Kota]

Thanks Andy
that’s really helpful, and good to know the world ranking position can be retrieved with the right permission. That makes the path clear: the request needs to come from the right digital person at JAAF. I’m working on identifying who that is from the Japan side, and I’ll come back to you as soon as I have someone
it would be brilliant to have your help facilitating. Much appreciated