The sport
Steinstossen is a traditional Swiss strength sport in which athletes throw or put heavy stones for distance. Its Swiss history reaches back to the 13th century, and the sport has been linked with the Unspunnen tradition since the Alpine festival of 1805. Modern competition ranges from the 83.5 kg Unspunnenstein and standing throws with a 40 kg stone to lighter run-up disciplines and women’s, youth, senior, team and regional categories.
The problem
The managing body has more than 21 years of results, but the history is stored mainly as individual ranking PDFs. Each document records one competition; it does not reveal an athlete’s long-term progression, how participation changes, which recurring events are growing, or how the sport is developing. Because stone weight, category, age group and technique vary, simple totals can also create misleading comparisons.
What the platform does
The prospect converts 305 result documents from 2004 to 2026 into a traceable, bilingual statistics platform. It connects 17,032 result rows and 18,228 explicitly recorded attempts to athletes, seasons and recurring competitions. Every performance trend keeps sex or category, stone weight, age group and technique separate, and every value can lead back to its source document. Scanned rankings are processed with OCR, while uncertain identities and missing attempts remain explicit rather than being guessed.
How statistics can help the sport
- Show each athlete’s progression, season bests and consistency within genuinely comparable disciplines
- Give coaches and athletes evidence for goal setting, preparation and long-term development
- Reveal participation, retention and category trends across women, men, youth and senior competition
- Measure the health and continuity of recurring competitions instead of viewing each ranking in isolation
- Preserve institutional memory, records and source documents in a searchable, auditable system
- Create credible stories for fans, media, sponsors and future athletes from the sport’s own history
- Expose archive gaps, naming inconsistencies and data-quality issues so they can be improved over time
SWISS TRADITION — ATHLETE PROGRESS — MEASURABLE HISTORY