Longest competitions path

Person

Connect each cuber's comps in chronological order, then sum great-circle distances segment by segment. Not flight paths — straight-line geodesics between venues.

The top spots usually go to year-round Eurasia / Americas commuters who rack up several hundred thousand km a year.

By the numbers

Haversine

Distance formula

Spherical great-circle, R = 6371 km

1000

Leaderboard depth

Top 1000 cubers

lat/lon ÷ 10⁶

Coord precision

WCA dump stores micro-degrees

Data source

Pull DISTINCT (person_id, competition_id) from results — multi-event same-comp counts once. Join competitions for venue lat/lon, sort by start_date, end_date. Coords are stored as micro-degrees (int × 10⁶); divide back.

Continental FMC virtual countries (XA, XE, XF, XM, XN, XO, XS, XW) are excluded — their coords aren't real.

sql

SELECT person_link,
       RADIANS(latitude / 1000000) lat,
       RADIANS(longitude / 1000000) lon
FROM (SELECT DISTINCT person_id, competition_id FROM results) pc
JOIN persons ON wca_id = person_id AND sub_id = 1
JOIN competitions ON competitions.id = competition_id
WHERE country_id NOT IN ('XA','XE','XF','XM','XN','XO','XS','XW')
ORDER BY start_date, end_date

Algorithm / pipeline

Group by person

SQL returns all (person, comp, coord) rows; TS buckets by person_link into a Map — each group is already time-sorted.

Haversine on adjacent pairs

For each cuber's N coords, compute N − 1 segments. a = sin²(Δφ/2) + cos φ₁ cos φ₂ sin²(Δλ/2); d = 2R · atan2(√a, √(1−a)).

Sum the segments

No clipping or dedup — flying back over the same square counts twice. Math.round to whole km, thin-space thousand separators.

Sort desc, take 1000

Top 1000 is deeper than the usual 100 — this is a geographic accumulator with a long tail of casuals.

Key formulae

Haversine distance

d = 2R · atan2(√a, √(1−a)), a = sin²(Δφ/2) + cos φ₁ cos φ₂ sin²(Δλ/2)

φ = lat in radians, λ = lon in radians, R = 6371 km. Yields great-circle (spherical shortest path) length.

Caveats & edges

Two consecutive comps at the same venue → 0 km; same city different venues → a few km, still counted.
Spherical assumption ignores terrain / actual flight routes; not real flown distance but negligible error at the scale of WCA touring.
Multi-day comps appear once on the path (deduped by competition_id).