Sunday, 17th December 2023 – More than two month have past now since the second World Championship in Streetlifting has took place. With this post we would like to take you back on our journey that we had as the team organizing this event.
But before we start, we would like to share a few words with you about this new blog format itself.
The blog format is a very suitable way for us to be able to pass on important information on a wider scale. Especially for readers who would like to have more context about our work or would like more in-depth insights, this format should become a regular update in the future. So if you enjoy this format or have any suggestions on how we can make this format even more attractive, we are happy if you let us know!
And here we go!
Our preparation for the WORLDS 23
Everything startet nearly one year before with the organization of the FinalRep WORLDS 22, the first World Championship in Streetlifting ever. This one event has really changed a lot for us. The impressions we have gathered there definitely reached a new level and exceeded everything we did before by far. A lot of people who have been there shared their amazement with about this competition. From this moment on we were convinced, that FinalRep has the potential to go far beyond what we have expected when we started this project in 2020. This being said we can tell you that our motivation was huge to go again for a new level with the WORLDS 2023.
Here is a brief overview of some points we focused on this time:
High standards – Even if a lot things have changed over the months, the standards we set ourselves stayed the same: to organize the most professional streetlifting event for the strongest athletes in the world
Bigger and stronger – It was important to us to represent an even wider range of nations as the year before. Our expectations were that we would gather the strongest streetlifters in the world in one place
and make history both in terms of sport and organization. We therefore went from promoting the sport mainly within the big streetlifting nations to speaking to everyone around the worldBetter conditions – We put high efforts in improving the conditions we offer to the athletes. This includes: sufficient warm up area, adjustable dip bars, competition plates both on the platform and in the warm up, the perfect warm-up and the perfect pull-up bar (especially regarding the quality).
Bigger team – In order to manage all these improvements we needed a lot more helping hands to make this happen.
Self-developed competition software – A key point was our FinalRep App and the competition software integrated into it. In advance to the WORLDS we have made a lots of test in order to guarantee the process runs a smooth as possible. Along the way we always kept in mind that we want to make this software usable for everyone in the long run.
More spectators – in the past, the spectators experience on site wasn’t our main focus to be honest. That we planned to change. We therefore shortly built up an own online shop which we used to promote and pre-sell online tickets. Our goal was to welcome 150-200 visitors and provide them with a great competition experience and good services on site.
Great livestream – From the first day we started FinalRep, having an attractive livestream was very important to us. Here, too, we decided to go one step further. We decided on a new collaboration: Rising Productions. Our goal in numbers was to reach 2000 simultaneous viewers at the peak and increasing the overall reach too.
How we experienced the event
The event itself more than exceeded our expectations. Here are some snapshot of our impressions including our honest feedback to ourself, what we want to improve the next time:
- Sport side – from a sporting perspective this was an unbelievable competition. Performances were achieved that were in the last three years.
Team size – Our organizational team finally reached over 30 people. Some of them with us from day one, some of them came all across the world to be part of it and everyone was 100% committed. A blessing for every organizer!
Schedule – One of the cornerstones of good athlete performance is, above all, sticking to the schedule. Although we’ve managed this well in most cases, there still were some deviations we will continue to reduce in the long term. Our goal here is to further optimize the processes in our team, especially in the field of stacking.
Spectators side – The more spectators we expected, the greater our concerns became that the capacity of the Krafthalle would be exceeded. Even though most went well, there is no question that we will be moving to a much larger venue next year. From now on we are focusing more on making it as pleasant as possible for our spectators next year, including seating options for everyone and a wider range of offers on site.
Livestream – We were extremely satisfied with the livestream quality. Especially the direction and the instant replay of the trials have brought us a big step forward. Thanks to some feedback we now also know which information are more important to be displayed and have to be mentioned more frequently throughout the commentary. In order to offer the best possible commentary, we would like to thank Gene explicitly, who traveled all the way from the USA! We also got the feedback that an Englisch only commentary is preferred which we agree too. Furthermore we noticed that some spectators were „keyboard warriors“, which is why we will also draw consequences there in the future.
One more topic – which was mentioned most frequently – was the judging. Because of the importance of this topic, here are a few more words on that…
Improvement on Judging as an ongoing process
Upfront to this topic being said that judging is maybe the most crucial and sensitive topic we face as an organizer of professional sports competitions. Everyone who is involved in such an event – athletes, coaches, judges and spectators – expects nothing less than a high level of consistency and transparency. This is absolutely justified, because it is the only way to ensure that the performances between the athletes are comparable and comprehensive. Nothing less do we expect from ourselves.
But what not many people see is the long way it takes to get to the point where is claim is realistic to fulfill. Especially then when you start nearly from scratch: creating our own rulebook, building a network of committed and competent judges, educating them, improving the rulebook and even more stuff in-depth. If we look back on that now, we can say that we are really proud of the progress we have made so far on this. Nonetheless, we are still some steps away from the highest level we aim at. We are aware that it will take more effort and iterations of our overall judging system in order to get to that level. Sometimes this means taking risks.
Introducing a new judging system is such a risk we consciously took by implementing some new aspects to our rulebook as we did upfront to the WORLDS. Looking back, we are very happy with this decision because it exposed us to a high pressure and therefore a high learning curve. So, what were our most important learnings on that topic:
Visibility and Transparency of the judging decisions: for everyone attending our events it is highly important to recognize and understand the judging decisions as good as possible. For us that means to improve our technical and physical setup for both on site and livestream.
Digital and direct judging: a major improvement we are going to go next year is to implement a direct judging into our competition software. Hereby it shall be possible for every judge to give his vote directly and independent into our competition software which then merges all votes to an overall judging decision.
International teams: Just as we aim to expand our events internationally, we are also planning to significantly increase the size of our judging team. Only then will we be able to set up an international team of judges for international events.
Improve judging system and performance of judging: Although we are very proud of the progress on our rulebook and judging we have made so far, we haven’t reached a level we aim at. Therefore, one major step we go in 2024 is the…
Introduction of an official FinalRep Streetlifting judging license
As we are still at a very early stage in the development of this license, we can only publish superficial information about it at the moment. What we can already say, however, is that it will be an online course with a final exam, initially in English only. This course will cover the theory of the rules and regulations in detail, as well as training in judging with the help of numerous instructional videos. Every successful graduate will receive the „Official FinalRep Judge“ certificate.
Finally, we have two requests for you in this regard:
Send us your training videos – in order to fill our license courses with sufficient training material, we need lots of videos of streetlifting exercises. Please send them directly to our head judge via Instagram
Judging-License pre-registration – For all those who would like to work as judges at our FinalRep Championships in the future, we have already created an early registration form here. Every registration in this form helps us to better estimate and plan the scope of the first training group.
If you have read our first blog up to this point, we would like to thank you for your attention and interest! Feel free to visit us again next time, when we will introduce you to by far the biggest invention in Streetlifting so far.
