With a growing interest in orienteering analysis, we have reproduced this article from the SA orienteering magazine with a few NZ references… many thanks to Frank Burden for this discussion.
 
About 10 years ago, after resuming running and orienteering after a 25-year injury-enforced break, I wanted to find out how fast I should expect to run. This interest turned into a series of computer programs that automatically rank by performance all orienteers in an event or series of events, regardless of gender, age, course length and climb. Very belatedly, I started to look at how other sports’ organisations tackled similar performance assessment problems. I unwittingly opened Pandora’s box. I found numerous systems with different objectives, adaptations of simple concepts, and some complex and almost unintelligible processes understood only by those who had invented them. Performance assessments are difficult in orienteering because many factors affect orienteering speed. These include weather, seasonal variations in vegetation, terrain, map, course planning, event altitude, and home advantage. I have assumed that these factors affect all competitors equally in an event. Specific factors that influence speed are each competitor (in particular their gender and age), course distance and climb. These specific factors became the focus of my analyses.

Graph of relative winner speeds for international orienteering forest events adjusted to a common distance on the flat. Of significance, analysis of nearly 900 international A-class and elite winners’ (M/W16 to M/W95) times in events since 2015 shows how much speed increases with age during the younger days of orienteering and declines in later years. Over the two-year period from entering M/W16, the average competitor in a bush or forest event can expect to run over 12% faster when at the older end of the same class, and for a 10-year class range for M/W75, the average competitor can expect to be about 35% slower. For a five-year class range in M/W75, speed slows by about 16%. Speed differences are slightly less in sprint orienteering, and even lower in running. Although age classes improve fairness and competitiveness across all ages, natural increase or decline in speed across a class still creates an inherent disadvantage for some.

In order to perform well, orienteers rely on physical fitness, their brain and eyesight to perform well. As age marches on, all of these deteriorate and combine to reduce orienteering speed.

The challenge developing a performance scoring system for orienteering is to take all of the above influences into account.

Scoring systems
The Pandora’s box I opened revealed that sports performance scoring systems fall into three broad categories, all of which have been applied to orienteering. They are:
•  Position-based scoring. This is the simplest scoring system. Identifying the top performer or team in a series or championship event is achieved by awarding scores in descending order from the top score for 1st position, and summing scores for a series or championship. While simple to implement for a single class of competition, this system will not identify the top performer or team across a large number of classes because position-based scores provide limited information on individual performances.
• Winner-referenced scoring 
In NZ we have the National Sprint League (NSL) and the National Orienteering League (NOL)  scoring systems for our athletes which Scott Smith handles. The rules are outlined here  but  a quick summary is that each race has a cap of 100 possible points (or 80 if M/W20s are running a seperate course) and athletes scores are scaled on their time behind the winner.
And two kiwi clubs, PAPO and Nelson have Orienteer of the Year competitions, points are allocated to each competitor in an OY event class based on speed relative to that of the class winner, with the ratio multiplied by 25 and they also have a minimum score. The best scores for a designated number of OY events in a year are summed and used to determine the class OY champion. See the system built by Ryan Moore here
• International-referenced scoring. The International Orienteering Federation World Ranking Scheme enables competitors from all federations to be compared. Ranking points are calculated using a weighting formula based on finish times relative to other world ranked competitors in events approved by the IOF Council. The scheme requires that at least one, and preferably more than eight, ranked competitors compete in each approved event. The Australian Elite Ranking Scheme applies to elite competitors in M/W20 and M/W21 classes. It incorporates points obtained from overseas World Ranking Events and is based on results in approved Australian Ranking Events using the same IOF WRS formula but with adjusted weightings.

The weekly international Parkrun series held over 5km, uses “age grading to allow park runners to compare results. Age grading takes your time and uses the world record time for your gender and age to produce a score (a percentage)”, and “allow rough comparisons between our participants”. World Masters Athletics developed an age grading system that enables a time, distance or height in a track or field event to be converted to the equivalent for a 21-34 year old competitor. Australian Para Athletics developed a multi-class scoring system for track and field athletes called BASELINE, which compares and allocates points for individual performances in a disability class against a base performance, which could be a world record or a top ranking performance.

Back to orienteering, although strictly not an international-referenced system, the ACT Age Gender Handicap System is similar to that developed by World Masters Athletics, but based on speed corrections derived in a study of national orienteering events. The aim of the ACT system is to identify “a single, best orienteer across all comparable age classes during a calendar year”.

Many systems are used in sports with many variants, one is the Elo Rating system  which was developed to calculate the relative skill levels of players in e-sports and chess games.  There are so many different performance scoring systems that have been developed, ranging from the simple but inflexible, to more complex. They all enable the performance of sports people of all ages and genders to be evaluated relative to an international standard. The IOF World Ranking and NZ NSL & NOL use a format that has potential to be adapted, unified and expanded to form so that all New Zealanders can benefit. Both O-nalyst and O-Zone do not yet have rankings systems but we believe Nathan’s O-nalyst is a work-in-progress. Nathan is working on combined results for Australia and New Zealand using the M/W20 and M/W21 events which had results available on Winsplits. Checkout:  onalyst.io. Previous to that, Statnav (by Steve Oram) used to run the unofficial NZ Rankings. To appear in the ranking, you had to complete five of the ranking events in a twelve month period. StatNav is now only updated sporadically, it is currently up-to-date to the end of September 2024.

Very much related to this, is a key Development Goal in the recent ONZ draft HP plan with a target framed around World Ranking Points. The NZ teams have made great progress on this during the recent Europe events. 
“Development Goal: Ten men and ten women will consistently maintain world ranking scores over 5500”.
Currently, 11 men and 9 women have forest scores over 5500.

Frank wraps up his article with … “Watch this space. The Pandora’s box still has much to reveal.”
Original article by Frank Burden, with relevant New Zealand additions