Identifying athletes across categories in specialist competitions

A competition gallery is only useful if people can find themselves in it. Athletes, families, clubs and sponsors all search by name or category. That makes captions important, and mistakes easy to notice.

This page belongs to our guide to specialist competition photography.

Records, not appearances

The central rule is that labels come from records, not from looking at people. Start lists, results sheets, lane or heat numbers, bib numbers and rosters are the reliable sources. Faces and bodies are not.

Guessing a category from someone's size, clothing or look is unreliable and can be hurtful. It can wrongly label a person as belonging to a group, or as less able than they are. We do not do this, and we ask readers of the gallery not to expect it.

Proportionate identifiers

Use the smallest identifier that does the job. Often a name with a team or number is enough. A date of birth, an address or a contact detail is rarely needed.

Purpose	A proportionate identifier
Athlete's own gallery	Name and heat or number
Club recap	Club name and result
Press set	Name, team and result, as the athlete agrees
Sponsor evidence	Event and context, rarely individuals

Our guide to photographing attendees whose names should not accompany their images is a useful companion where naming is a concern.

Who answers questions

Name one person on the organiser's side who can answer identification questions during the event and afterwards. Without that person, the crew may be left to guess. Our event photograph caption worksheet provides a simple structure for the information you will need to give.

Labels that may be sensitive

Some category labels reveal more than a result does. Age group, weight class and adaptive classification can all say something about a person. Include them only when the purpose needs them and the person has agreed.

For junior events, labels may also be linked to safeguarding. See junior competitors in mixed-age specialist events. For adaptive categories, see adaptive categories within specialist sporting programmes.

When records are incomplete

Records are not always perfect. Start lists change, athletes swap, and numbers are misread. When the record is unclear, the caption should stay general rather than guess. A caption such as "Women's open class, heat 3" is better than a wrong name.

Our guide to accurate captions, credits and event context sets out the principle, and it applies as much to a specialist competition as to a company event.

A hypothetical example

For example, imagine a competition with six categories and 300 athletes. The organiser supplies a roster with names, club, category and bib number, and a named volunteer to answer questions. The photographer records bibs where visible, but captions come from the roster.

Two athletes swapped bibs before a heat. The volunteer tells the crew, and captions for that heat use the corrected roster. After delivery, a parent reports a wrong name. The volunteer confirms the correct one, and the file is renamed the same day.

Sharing and corrections

Decide who can see which labels. A club might see its own athletes' names, while public sets carry only the event and category. The image-use and approval register records who may use which images. For multi-area events where athletes move between areas, see functional-fitness competitions with several workout areas, and for stage events, bodybuilding and physique-stage competitions.

Questions to ask the organiser

Can the roster be shared before the event, and in what form? Will bibs or numbers be worn and visible? Who handles late changes? Are any athletes unwilling to be named? Is there a standard way to write categories? Answers to these make captions faster to write and less likely to be wrong.

What we confirm

We confirm date, venue, crew, deliverables and quotation in writing, together with the records we caption from and the person who corrects them. We do not guess, and we say so in the quotation.