Welcome to StatNav - New Zealand's Unofficial Orienteering Rankings

We track the performances of around 2500 orienteers throughout New Zealand, compiling a ranking list that allows you to compare yourself to your rivals and clubmates.

The latest rankings are as at the end of September 2024.

StatNav: A brief explanation

Historical ranking information is available back to March 2014. The original StatNav rankings ran from 2012/13 but the first year or so of data has been lost. If you're really keen you can use the Wayback Machine to find it.

Events:

We calculate points for all events in New Zealand at OY level and above. This includes the National Champs, Regional Champs, Long Weekend Multi-Day events and the OY series of Auckland, Hawkes Bay, Wellington, Nelson, PAPO and Dunedin. We may also include other events from time to time, particularly if they attract a number of orienteers from throughout the country. Our selection criteria does tend to under-represent the Central Districts and Southland areas; we'd love to be able to include more events from those clubs.

The rankings include Sprint, Middle and Long Distance events and variations. They exclude Relays, Night Events, Score Events and Rogaines.

You must complete five ranking events in a twelve month period to appear in the ranking lists.

Event information is available back to September 2020 so an Individual's recent results and the Head2Head feature only go back to that date. It is theoretically possible for us to go back and add older events but the likelihood of this being done is very, very small.

Courses:

We track Red and Purple courses only, no ranking points are given for Orange, Yellow or White courses. We allocate points to all Red courses that have at least 10 orienteers who complete the course without mispunching. If a course fails to meet the 10 runner criteria it generally won't get ranking points allocated but occasionally we will make an exception. In recent years we have been making more and more exceptions as it appears six or seven ranked runners is sufficient to get a reasonable result.

Grades / Classes:

The terms "Class" and "Grade" are used interchangably on this website.

We calculate points at a Course level, not Class level. This means that you will still gain ranking points even if you are running out of grade or running in a "Short" class as long as you are running a Red course. The Grade Rankings on this website will show you in the grade that you qualify for on the basis of your year of birth regardless of what grade you normally run in. Information about your year of birth is difficult to source and so it is entirely possible that we've got yours wrong. If we don't have any record about your year of birth, you'll appear in the M/W21 grade. If this is the case send us an email at admin@oru.nz and let us know, we'd love to hear from you.

We only track grades M/W16 and above as M/W14 and below don't run Red courses. However, it is possible for a M/W14/12/10 to choose to run up and they would then be allocated ranking points. They will appear in M/W16 if they do.

Club:

To appear in the rankings list you must be associated with a New Zealand Orienteering Club. We'd love to insist that you are a financial member of that club but that information isn't easy to get so we go with the "association" test instead. Basically, if your club gives you OY points then we assume that they are happy to claim you. There is no requirement that you be a New Zealand resident or citizen, a number of short term overseas visitors appear in the ranking list due to the "association" test. As with grades, it is possible that we've got your club association wrong, particularly if you have changed clubs since we started tracking results at the beginning of 2011. Chide us gently at admin@oru.nz and we'll make sure it is correct next month.

Points:

We calculate points using a variation of the algorithm that the British Orienteering Federation designed for their ranking system and that has since been adopted for World Ranking points. You can get a full explanation of how it works at the BOF website; our points system differs in that we count the best five events over a twelve month period rather than the six that the British use, and we only update once a month rather than their weekly system.

Every orienteer that we track has a "Current Score" which is the average (mean) of the points per event they have scored in the past twelve months. We adjust these scores every month so that nationwide the average Current Score is 1000 with a standard deviation of 200. In practice, this is quite a small adjustment with most months scores being adjusted by less than 10 points.

For each course at each event we calculate the average and standard deviation of the Current Scores of all the orienteers who complete the course and then compare that to the average and standard deviation of the times taken by those orienteers. We exclude the bottom 10% (rounded up) from that calculation. Non-ranked orienteers (those without a current score or those not associated with a New Zealand orienteering club) are excluded from the calculation but do get allocated points.

Your ranking score is then the sum of your best five results from the last twelve months. This is updated monthly with a months results rolling off as each new month is added. Hence your ranking score may change even if you don't compete in any events in a given month.

Remember that only orienteers who have scored points in five or more events in the last twelve months will appear in the ranking lists.

Random Maps:

These are maps from our collection, so they may not cover the course you ran. They are all from events that are used in calculating the rankings. At the time of writing, there are 40 of them; we'll add more when we get time. If you have a map or three that you think is interesting, send a jpg to admin@oru.nz and we might add it to the collection.