Rainbow Road Worldwide Top 10 Progression (2009 - 2021)

I've been wanting to do something like this for a long time, I just didn't know how. I like to think I have a good understanding of the history on this track, which is why I ultimately chose RR over any other course. I've also kept track of the top 10 as far back as 2013 (with a few holes here and there), so putting this together wasn't as hard as I thought. I found a couple mistakes when watching over the final product, but I wasn't too bothered to fix them. For a first try, I'm glad to say I'm content with the results.

Showing the progression on a month-to-month basis definitely would've been interesting as well, but too cluttered. I also didn't want the challenge of filling in all those holes from the information that I already had. January of 20XX and June of 20XX just so happened to work perfectly, as those dates mark the beginning and middle of the year, respectively. I didn't have anything for pre-2013, so I had to do some digging for the leaderboards during those years. Some of the former world record videos displayed a top 10 during the date the run was set, and if it wasn't shown in the video, some users were kind enough to note the top 10 in the description (God bless you, Andy Tran). Luckily enough, that was the case for nearly every year before 2013. The hardest part was removing cheated times/banned players (Nagisa, Mander, Walter). Not necessarily editing them out, but finding out who the player to take 10th place was. I'm very confident in my accuracy, but I wouldn't be surprised if I made a mistake somewhere.

I'm not sure I'll make any more of these, as this was a very situational case. I don't know the history of other tracks as well as I do with this one, and I don't have the free time or motivation right now for such a thing. I'm afraid this might be a one-off. Perhaps I'll do one later down the road for the sake of conveniently archiving a leaderboard.

Also, shout out to Loaf for all of his work on https://www.tt-rec.com/
None of this would have been possible without it

Some interesting stats I found along the way:

⟾ Days spent on WW top 10 (As of 04/06/2023)
● Keke - ≈3,412 Days
● A. Wesker - ≈3,581 Days (Knocked off on 12/19/2021)
● Leaf - 3,319 Days
● LSAN - 3,911 Days (Ongoing)
● Flare - 3,665 Days (Ongoing)
● Ando - 3,503 Days (Ongoing)
● Kaede - 2,956 Days (Ongoing)

FYI: From start to finish, this probably took me about 10 hours total (I started working on this in January).

Side note: I wasn't sure what to do with Daniel's times, as his 2:25.162, as well as his other times on this track are legitimate, but banned from the leaderboards due to his past. I didn't want to take away from his progression throughout the years since his RR times weren't cheated. At the end of the day, his record doesn't count, so I decided to remove his times after his 2:25.371, while keeping all of his previous times.