Mongolia’s national Naadam festival runs on a structure most competition software was never built for: a wrestling bracket of 512 or 1024 entrants fought over nine or ten straight-knockout rounds, finishing not in a numbered placing but in a traditional title a wrestler carries for life. Archery and horse racing run alongside it on their own scoring logic. If you organise a Naadam-style “three manly games” festival — or any multi-discipline sports meet that mixes bracket knockouts with title-based ranking instead of plain scores — this is the shape your software needs to support.
What Naadam actually is
Naadam — literally “the three manly games” (Eriin Gurvan Naadam) — is Mongolia’s national festival, built around three disciplines: Wrestling (Bökh), Archery, and Horse Racing. A state organising committee runs the festival, and officials present medals and certificates to winners. Entrants typically qualify up through smaller regional Naadams before reaching the national event, since the national wrestling bracket runs at fixed, large sizes that need advance enrolment.
The structural problem: a knockout bracket, not a score sheet
Most of the competitions this blog covers — dance, song, speech, craft — are scored: a panel of judges marks each performance against a rubric, and the marks decide the placing. Naadam wrestling doesn’t work that way. It is a single-elimination bracket at a fixed size (512 or 1024 wrestlers), run over nine or ten rounds, where every match has one winner and one loser and the loser is out. There is no numeric score to average or weight — the result is purely “won this round or didn’t.”
What makes this genuinely interesting for competition software is what replaces the score: Mongolian wrestling has its own title ladder, awarded by the round a wrestler reaches rather than by points:
| Title (English meaning) | Round reached |
|---|---|
| Nachin (Falcon) | 5th round winner |
| Zaan (Elephant) | 7th round winner |
| Arslan (Lion) | Tournament winner |
| Avarga (Titan) | Two-time Arslan (repeat champion) |
That last row is the detail organisers tend to miss when they first try to model this: Avarga isn’t a round, it’s a career title earned by winning the whole tournament a second time. A platform needs a rank/title mechanism that can express “this result depends on a past result,” not just a fixed set of placings re-used every year.
How this maps onto event software
In practice, this is exactly the gap between a scored competition and a ranked one. Most arts and craft items in a festival are graded on marks (an A/B/C band, a bonus-point scheme). Naadam wrestling instead needs a Rank mechanism — a named title tied to tournament progress rather than a number tied to a score sheet — which is a different setup step in eTalenter’s Scoring Setup than a typical marks-based item. If your software only lets you configure “grade bands by score,” a bracket-and-title event like this will not fit without a rank-based option.
Archery and horse racing, by contrast, run on their own logic again:
- Archery — a target cylinder (a “sur”) knocked out of its stand counts as a hit; hits closer to the centre of the row of surs score higher than hits at the edge. It is a hit-based, not a time-based or marks-out-of-100 scoring model.
- Horse Racing — real Naadam horse racing is organised into six categories by the horse’s age, not the rider’s. That is a categorisation axis most competition platforms (including the age-group setup most festivals use) are built around the participant’s age, not an animal’s — worth deciding explicitly in your own event setup rather than assuming it carries over.
The organiser lesson here is the same one this blog keeps coming back to for multi-discipline festivals: don’t force three different disciplines onto one shared scoring template. Set each one up on the mechanism that actually fits — bracket + rank for wrestling, a hit-scale for archery, a separate category axis for racing — rather than bending all three into a single 100-point rubric because that’s what the software defaults to.
Running this kind of event with eTalenter
eTalenter supports both models side by side in the same event: mark-based grading with configurable grade bands for scored items, and a Rank mechanism for competitions (like a knockout bracket) where the result is a title or placing rather than a score. You can also run this as a Sports-type event rather than Arts — Sports events in eTalenter use manual result entry instead of a judge-scoring panel, which suits a bracket where the outcome of each match is simply recorded, round by round, rather than marked by a panel.
Whatever shape your own festival takes — a single discipline or a full “manly games” style multi-event meet — the same organiser groundwork applies: set your age/entrant categories first, decide per competition whether it’s scored or ranked, and get your bracket or rubric published before entries open.
FAQ
Is Naadam wrestling judged by a panel, like a dance or music competition?
No. It is decided match by match in a single-elimination bracket — there is no panel scoring a performance, only a winner and a loser in each bout.
Can software built for scored arts competitions handle a bracket like this?
Only if it supports a rank/title mechanism separately from mark-based grading. A platform that only offers “grade by score” will struggle to express a title like Avarga that depends on a past tournament result, not the current one.
Does the age-group setup used for arts events apply to something like horse racing here?
Not directly — real Naadam horse-racing categories are set by the horse’s age, not the rider’s, so if you are modelling this in event software, decide explicitly whether your age/category setup is tracking the participant or the animal, rather than assuming the usual age-group logic carries over.
See it before you set it up
Open a eTalenter live demo and sign in as a demo coordinator or judge — no sign-up needed — to see how Scoring Setup handles both grade-based and rank-based competitions in the same event. For a Mongolia-style multi-discipline sports meet, see our competition management software overview, or reach us on WhatsApp at +91 96056 56508 or support@etalenter.com.
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