Competition

Across 73,099 senior IJF contests, groundwork accounts for 20% of all scores. Split by what was actually awarded, that one figure turns into three very different ones.

Groundwork takes 39% of every ippon and 3% of every waza-ari. That is not a technique being better or worse; it is groundwork being all-or-nothing. A hold either matures into a finish or the referee stands them up, so it rarely scores the middle score at all.

The split is not the same for men and women, and the gap is wider than the gap between any two weight classes. Every division in the women's table is above every division in the men's, from the lightest to the heaviest, with no overlap at all.

By ippon the gap is wider still: 31% of men's ippons come from the ground against 50% of women's. Half of every ippon scored in senior women's judo is groundwork.

These figures count scores, not how often a contest reaches the ground without producing one. They also do not show that groundwork is tactically superior: a hold that scores ippon ends the contest, while a throw for waza-ari leaves time for a reply. That structural difference helps explain why 99% of groundwork scores, against 92% of standing scores, belong to the eventual winner.

See it broken down by division

The same 38,077 scores again, sorted into the eight families of the Kodokan classification that this reference is built on. Every technique belongs to exactly one of them, so unlike most figures on this page these do add up.

Foot and leg techniques are the largest family in both, and by almost exactly the same amount, which is worth knowing before anyone decides that men and women score differently. Where the two do part is te-waza, at 26% of scores in the men's divisions against 19% in the women's.

What this is not is a syllabus. It counts what scored at senior international level, where a family being small is often a fact about the rules rather than about the judo: strangles and joint locks are taught to every grade and are barred below the age at which most people learn them. Read it as what the elite mat rewards, beside what your grading scheme asks for, never instead of it.

Not every contest is won by scoring. Of the 33,849 contests whose ending the IJF recorded, 22% were decided on penalties rather than on a technique, and 92% of those endings were a third shido rather than a direct hansoku-make.

49% of them arrive in golden score. That is the same stretch of the contest where the counters do their best work: o-soto-gaeshi and o-uchi-gaeshi score a higher share of their points after regular time than anything else in judo. Golden score is where contests are both won and thrown away.

And the penalties themselves are overwhelmingly for not fighting rather than for anything dangerous. Of 70,165 penalties given, non-combativity is 43%, false attack is 20% and avoid grip is 12%. Everything else together, from gripping offences to leaving the area, makes up the remaining 25%.

The denominator matters here more than the percentages do. The IJF tagged the ending of 33,849 of the 73,099 contests in this data; the rest carry no events at all, so their ending is unknown rather than uneventful. Every figure above is a share of the endings on record, never of every contest fought.

See how your own division is lost