Data Downloads

Strongman has never had a shared, citable data standard the way powerlifting or Olympic weightlifting do. OpenStrongman is trying to build one, which means being upfront about the rules we're following, not just the data itself.

License

The underlying facts here, who competed, what they lifted, where, and when, aren't owned by anyone.¹ Competition results are public record. The specific files, structure, and categorization this project builds and maintains could, in principle, carry their own compiled-database rights, but we waive those too: all OpenStrongman data is dedicated to the public domain under Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0 Universal).² Use it, modify it, redistribute it, build a commercial product on it. No permission needed, no credit required, no exceptions. See DATA-LICENSE in the repository for the full legal text.

Nothing about this license requires you to cite OpenStrongman. We're asking anyway, because a citation is how a young project like this builds the track record that keeps it maintained, and because it's the norm the rest of the research world already runs on.⁸

How to Cite This Data

If you're citing a specific snapshot rather than the live site, since this database grows and changes over time, use the versioned citation in CITATION.cff, or the DOI of the specific data release you used, once a release has been made.

Data Contributors

OpenStrongman itself stays unattributed, no maintainer names on this site. That's separate from crediting the people who send in data. Anyone who submits or verifies competition results can opt in to be listed by name, with an ORCID iD if they have one, in CONTRIBUTORS.md. Being listed there is credit for a data contribution, not a claim of authorship, that's a separate and higher bar, covered below.

Contributors listed with an ORCID iD get that credit attached to a citable, DOI-backed data release once one goes out, and it can show up as a work on their own ORCID profile if they've enabled it. Ask to be added when you open your pull request.

Collaboration & Authorship

We built this because we want people to use it: to write papers, build tools, ask questions we haven't thought of yet. If that's you, open an issue on our GitHub repo describing what you're working on and how OpenStrongman's data fits in. That's the front door, no email chasing, no gatekeeping, just tell us what you're building.

We also want to be upfront about where OpenStrongman fits into a published work, because getting this right is part of respecting the people who did the actual collaborating.

Using our dataset earns a citation, the format is above. Co-authorship is a different bar, and it's the same one we'd expect applied to our own contributions if we joined a project properly. The widely used ICMJE standard sets four conditions, and all four have to be met³:

1. Substantial contribution to the work's conception or design, or to acquiring, analyzing, or interpreting its data
2. Drafting the work or critically revising it for important content
3. Final approval of the version to be published
4. Agreement to be accountable for the accuracy and integrity of the whole work

The CRediT taxonomy, which many publishers now use to describe individual contributions like "data curation," is explicit that describing a contribution isn't the same as qualifying for authorship.⁴ Supplying source data, on its own, doesn't meet the bar above, for us or for anyone. That distinction matters more than it used to: recent research on academic publishing documents how routinely authorship credit gets diluted through practices, like honorary or gift authorship, that don't reflect real contribution.⁵

When it does, when we're actually involved in the design, analysis, or writing of a project, meeting those four conditions, we're glad to be named as co-authors. That's an invitation, not a formality. Open that issue early if you think that's the shape of what you're building.

How We Used AI, and What We Expect From You

In the interest of holding ourselves to the same standard described below: this site and its tools, including the Explore chart builder and the section you're reading now, were built with the assistance of Claude Sonnet 5, an AI model made by Anthropic, with human review, revision, and testing at every step.

The Rogue Invitational, Giants Live, and World's Strongest Man results currently in this database were compiled the same way: Claude was directed to pull publicly available competition results from federation results pages into this site's structured format, reviewed, revised, and tested by OpenStrongman's maintainers. As new data sources get added, this section will be updated to say how each one was compiled, by AI assistance, by hand, or, ideally, contributed directly by the federations and platforms themselves.

The same standard applies in reverse. If you use AI tools, including large language models, to analyze or write about this data, ICMJE guidance is direct: AI tools can't be listed as authors, because they can't be accountable for a work's accuracy,⁶ and any AI use in producing a manuscript should be disclosed, the same disclosure we just gave you. Recent research has found that large language model use is already reshaping how scientific ideas get proposed, selected, and funded at a national scale,⁷ which is exactly why disclosure and human accountability matter more, not less, as these tools get more capable. You're responsible for what you publish, whatever helped you produce it.