OpenTrack is just back from a busy trip to the Netherlands
Athletics Now - it can be done
First stop was a session with the authors of Atletiek.nu - “Athletics Now” in English - the hosted competition management that’s taken over the country. Mark van Tubergen started building this for his local club in 2012, and it got so big he has had to follow in the footsteps of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and drop out of university to support the business!
It was great to talk to people who’ve been working on exactly the same challenges as us, but for longer. Atletiek.nu has grown in 3 years to handling over 500 competitions this year.
Hopefully we’ll be able to collaborate on getting the basic reference data for the sport standardised, and to help them out with real-time capture in future.
Asterix track race, Eindhoven
Friday night saw the big open meeting organised by ESAV Asterix, the student athletics club at the University of Eindhoven.
We tried out the latest generation of our live field event results, covering several throwing events. We also got to see Atletiek.nu in action, and could easily download start lists. Looking ahead, a couple of webhooks would make it easy to jump instantly from a system like that into live recording.
These people really know how to put on a good meeting. It was a perfect warm night in a beautiful stadium, with great music, fantastic officials and commentary, and great performances. Things finished off with beer relays in fancy dress and a party in the stands. Your correspondent retreated before the disco got going.
- Andy Robinson, 12 June 2016