The Inside Story Of
JudoInside.com
Not everybody who has a black belt in judo and love the sport can be a world-level competitor. But there are other ways to achieve something notable in the sport. The folks behind Fighting Films for example, have made a big difference with their high-quality judo videos. And veteran photographer David Finch’s vast archive of judo pictures that span more than four decades includes many iconic shots familiar to judo fans around the world.
In the area of judo results and statistics, there is no better resource than JudoInside.com. Any fan of judo would have visited it, to read news, to look at photos, to watch videos, but most of all to check out judo results. JudoInside.com is not the product of a big sports company but the work of one man: Hans van Essen, a judo black belt who studied journalism and who at one time aspired to be a professional sports commentator.
His penchant for keeping tabs of judo results began in his teens when studying for a journalism career. “As I was a judoka, I started to keep track of judo results,” he recalls.
So rather than just watching judo events, I wanted to know also know more about the players, what their previous results were, who they won against, who they lost against and so on. This all started as a journalistic endeavour.”
In 1990, he began to diligently maintain an offline judo database (there was no Internet back then). Two years later, in 1992, he compiled those results and turned them into a judo yearbook.
He had no backers and did this out of his own pocket. “I produced printed guides but it was not easy to sell,” Hans says. “It cost quite a lot back then to do a book for a sport that’s quite niche.”
The birth of JudoInside.com
Although it wasn’t a successful commercial endeavour, it was the foundation of what would eventually become JudoInside.com, which would come into existence a decade later in 2002. Little did he realize it would become an obsession for which he spends an average of 10 hours a day on, something he’s been doing non-stop since.
The website, which has a lot of features and functionality sits on top of a powerful database which allows him to get generate interesting statistics and features like “Head-to-Head” results, which allows readers to see exactly who has fought who over the years and the results of their contests against each other. It’s extremely useful for analysis purposes, whether by coaches or journalists.
What may surprise many people is that while the website is driven by a sophisticated database, all the results that go into it are still entered manually.
“I know it sounds stupid to have to do that in this day and age but there aren’t many resources that can deliver structured data from judo competitions, which can deliver consistent spelling for names of players and so on,” he explains. “So, if you try to automate it you will end up having to manually inspect all the results and manually fixing the mistakes one by one. In the end, it’s much better to do it right in the first place, which unfortunately means manual data entry.”
Keeping accurate track of judo results is a more challenging business than most realize. For example, sometimes players get married and their surname changes. And then you’ve got the Koreans, the Mongolians and the Chinese whose names can be spelled in many different ways. Sometimes it’s not clear which are surnames and which personal names.