Sports Technology

WHY—What has driven us?

As management partner of the professional triathlon team TEAM SPORT FOR GOOD, we were challenged to accompany endurance events with media coverage. When one of our athletes, Horst Reichel, suddenly didn’t show up at Ironman Arizona at any intermediate time, we asked ourselves for several hours: “Where is Horst?”. Only in the evening he could inform us about his defect on the bike course.
The motivation was aroused. In the age of 4G and geo-tracking it had to be possible to permanently record the locations of athletes. We contacted a live tracking device provider from motor sports (LiveRank), approached Deutsche Telekom together and tackled the first GPS-based triathlon live tracking in a team - and this at one of the biggest events in the world, the “Challenge Roth.”

HOW—How did we deal with the challenges?

Our part was to develop a responsive web-platform that works for both the people at home and the fans at the track. In addition, the application should serve the safety of the athletes by an integrated SOS function. And of course the platform had to be adaptable for further events.
So there were several challenges:

• Creating individual routes - also through woods and meadows
• Compensation of GPS fluctuations for a smooth display
• Applicability for single starters and relay teams
• Short-term adaptability of route or participant data in the CMS
• Our own claim: Best possible infotainment for the users

As the available mapping services did not cover the project requirements, we developed a method for interpolating location-based data on user-defined routes (track matching), which allowed us to integrate necessary business logic such as checkpoints, lap acquisition, signal loss areas, etc. Since this was a prototype project under high time pressure, we proceeded iteratively and in constant coordination with the hardware developers and Deutsche Telekom.

WHAT—What was the result?

The result was a successful deployment at the Challenge Roth 2016 with the premiere of a responsive infotainment application which, in addition to the athlete visualization, was able to display race-relevant data such as speed, position, lap number, distances to the finish/leader/front man, network/GPS signal strength and SOS position live.