As we wrote earlier today, in the 2022 WTCS only half of the races in the regular season counted towards athletes’ total scores. Of the eight races in the Series, an athlete only had to score at four of them ahead of the Final in Abu Dhabi.
With that in mind, at which races did the top-15 athletes in the WTCS standings score their points? We did not include the Abu Dhabi Final in this analysis. As the Series Final, the reason for attendance is in the name and athletes would not skip that.
One thing to note is that some athletes raced beyond their quota and so scored points that did not count towards their final total. When we say scored here, then, that refers only to points that actually counted to an athlete’s final amount.
The Men’s Series
The above graph shows how many of the men’s WTCS top-15 recorded scores that counted towards their final totals at each event.
Straight off the bat, we can see that Hamburg (2021) and Cagliari fared relatively poorly compared to the rest of the Series. Indeed, only five of the top-20 men in the world benefitted from points in Cagliari.
The four men of the top-15 whose scores in Cagliari counted were Alex Yee, Matthew Hauser, Lasse Luehrs and Manoel Messias. Meanwhile, in Hamburg in 2021, only Leo Bergere and Antonio Serrat Seoane had the race count towards their totals.
Montreal, by contrast, was the most popular scoring location of the men’s field. The entire top-5 in the world raced and recorded points there.
If we narrow the search to the top-10 men in the WTCS, though, the results change slightly.
Leeds saw the most scores count towards final totals, with seven of the top-10 scoring points there. Six of the top-10 scored counting points in Yokohama and Montreal, while five scored in Bermuda, Abu Dhabi (2021) and Hamburg (2022). Only three of the top-10 scored points that counted in Cagliari, while only one man did that in Hamburg (2021).
The lesson we can draw from the graph is that 25% of the men’s 2022 Series did not make major contributions towards the scores of the world’s top-15. Even Abu Dhabi (2021) and Yokohama were not hugely influential as less than half of the top-15 in the men’s Series actually scored there.
The Women’s Series
The above graph of scores that counted at women’s WTCS events shows an interesting set of differences to the men’s graph.
Whereas Montreal was the most popular scoring location for the men’s top-15, only a third of the women’s top-15 scored there. Along with Hamburg (2021) and Abu Dhabi (2021), Montreal was one of three under-represented venues in the women’s Series.
Another difference is that the women’s Series had two events in which ten of the top-15 scored. In addition, five of the events saw 50% or more of the top-15 in the Series score.
What we therefore see is that the top-15 women in the world generally scored at similar locations and that there was a more defined separation in scoring.
To compare the men’s and women’s scoring more closely, we can review the below graph (the men are represented by the blue and the women by the orange).
What can we take away from this data?
The first point seems to be that an eight race regular season might be too long, particularly if athletes are only incentivised to score at four events. The numbers seem to indicate that athletes would race at around five or six to ensure their quota was filled and that they had some wiggle room in the event of a bad day.
In light of this, the optimum Series length may actually be six events with four or five to count towards scoring, plus a Final to also be added at the end of the season. This fits the general historical pattern of the WTCS and again highlights that the 2022 season was generally a little weird coming after the pandemic and the delays that caused.
What do you think the optimum number of events is in a WTCS season? And how many should count towards the final scores?
