So the journey to create insight into the world of obstacle course racing through purely public online means has begun with the creation of the Obstacle Course Race Database. With well over 1,000 Google searches and clicking through site after site after site after site... I attempted to find the number of runners per race, races per series, and average cost of registration to speculate race series' revenue from registration. It's not perfect but it's got to start somewhere. We learned from Nate Silver that models are never perfect but a good modeler will work to improve what s/he's got.
Since many people are afraid of numbers, they won't bother with the data (quantitative information) and will rely on what they already know and can easily find (qualitative information). Former Orlando Magic head coach, Stan Van Gundy, said at this year's MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, "I don't need an inch-thick packet of data to tell me that LeBron James is good at basketball." Nor did he have time to sort through and mentally digest that information. Well, I'm no NBA head coach. I don't work for a major OCR sponsor. I'm not a frequent OCR runner. But I do pay attention when I hear about races and do have Google at my fingertips. So what did I already know or could easily find?
The Qualitative Guess:
I spent about 10 minutes making a preliminary list of which race series I thought were the biggest players in the industry and filled in the model before filling in the blanks A-Z. Here were my top guesses and their estimated revenue.
There you have it. I'll post what I found soon. I'm off to sort some data.
PS: I'll try to sync the bar graph color with the blog color next time. Maybe some bigger font too.
PS: I'll try to sync the bar graph color with the blog color next time. Maybe some bigger font too.
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