Dear SCORE, fix your offroadsman of the year awards please.
After winning that award a few times, I have some comments to make…
Baja 400 ‘24
When I was shooting photos for fun way back when I was a college kid, it was one of my dreams to be one of the “offroadsman of the year” and see my name along with those who I considered my heroes at the time…
Then I went pro getting nominated almost right away, shieet, I think I’ve been nominated like 10 times already... Since the first time after realizing how the general voting works, I notice that the award didn’t mean much more than a popularity contest, and what’s even worse, there was no limit on how many times any person can vote; when my mom realized that, that’s when probably I won for the first time in 2021.
Not that I didn’t deserve it, I know the quality of my work but as much proud as I wanted to be for earning it finally, it felt empty… Then again in 2022 and 2023… same story, 3 empty rocks sits on my parents shelf.
The award of a “World Desert Championship”
2022
I kept telling them about how that award system needs to change, how it needs to be based on merits, on quality of work, but SCORE answer is always the same “we’ll look into that“
And now, the current voting for the 2024 edition they brought in the feature “you can vote 3 times a day!” like, what’s the point of that? everybody that I speak with from this industry thinks the SCORE awards are a joke, and this just proves it.
The cherry on top, you might ask? It’s that the last 3 years I won it, SCORE wanted me to purchase a ticket(s) in order to attend the gala party to pick up the award. I thought that the winners at the very least, get to the party for free, that way i wouldn’t mind to pay for my people to come with me, but no.
SCORE awards in a nutshell. Without a change, the awards are nothing more than a facebook like contest, hell, even in facebook you can ‘like’ it only one time giving it more credibility.
And that’s not all…
When you cast a vote, you need to vote for all categories participating like mechanic, pits, rookie, video, sponsor-of-the-year among others. I barely know some, and I work inside the industry, how are people suppose to know everyone? Please for the love of whatever god, we need context.
Visual representation of a vote. extra finger included.
So I don’t want to just rant without leaving a couple of solutions…
Easy:
The easiest thing to do, bare minimum is to lock the voting system to one vote per ip. That’s definitely not a real solution but at the very least is something.
Add a background of each nominee, why are they nominated in the first place.
Real one:
Create a jury that can come with a selection of nominees that actually did something great that year. Make sure you show why those people are worth an award. In the case of the photography and other media categories its easy, just ask for our best photo/content and pick your favorites.
Do you want to keep the public voting? that’s cool but again, one vote per ip and that vote count only adds a percentage in the winner selection along the other juries decision.
You can even charge a membership fee to those who want to compete in the awards if you’re so desperate for money, just don’t ask the winners to pay for the ticket to attend the awards gala.
I love you SCORE and I want the best for you, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing all this.
See you in San Felipe.
