Iron Insights

We are trying to build the most complete and most reliable record of bodybuilding competition results that exists. This page explains how that record was put together, and where it is still imperfect.

Iron Insights focuses mainly on the IFBB Pro League and the NPC. Their competitions are open to any eligible athlete and judged in front of a public audience. The results are published after the show. We are and have been gathering, cleaning, and organizing that information from the organizations, news platforms, and other sources that report on the sport.

Results published this way become part of the public record of the sport. Our aim is to keep that record in one place, so that it does not quietly disappear the way old websites and old magazines do. We verify what we add and correct what turns out to be wrong.

We are not connected to any of the organizations. Iron Insights is independent of the federations whose competitions it covers.

Our main source was scorecards. A scorecard is what the judges actually filled in, so it is the most reliable account of a competition, and unlike most results published afterwards, it carries not only the placings but also the scores.

We searched for as many scorecards as we could find. However, it is not possible to find one for every competition. That is why we also gathered information from the organizations, news platforms, and other sources that report on the sport. No single source held everything, so we compared them with each other and with the scorecards we already had. Where they agreed, we could be confident. Where they disagreed, we had to work out which version was right.

The data we found in the different sources and the scorecards brought a big chunk of work with it. The same athlete turned up under different spellings, with the middle name included or dropped, or under a different name entirely. Competitions were renamed from one year to the next, or written differently by different sources. Sorting out which records described the same person, which described the same competition, and how all of it fitted together was a big part of building this database.

The matching is not finished, and it is the main source of the mistakes still in the data. One athlete can appear as two profiles because two sources wrote the name differently, and a single profile can carry the results of two different people who shared a name. Competitions are still missing, and some of the results we found may have been wrong before they ever reached us.

We continuously work on the database and try to improve it, find those errors, and make it as reliable as possible. We are still searching for scorecards we have not found yet, since those remain the most reliable source of data. We are still checking for mixed-up profiles and missing competitions, and putting them right.

If you notice something missing, something wrong, or a profile that looks like it belongs to two different people, please tell us. Athletes, promoters, judges, and fans see things we cannot. Write to main@iron-insights.com and we will correct the data, merge the profiles, or add what is missing. If you have a photograph of a scorecard, that is the most useful thing you can send. We check everything that reaches us, and once we are satisfied it is correct, we add it.