Sotic is all over the ‘Worlds’!

Sotic have specialised in live sports data presentation for over twenty years, covering more than 20,000 live events, including 27 World Cups across numerous different sports. This summer, every ‘World’ sporting event (and then some!) seemed to convene all at once, each event a showcase for the sport and the Sotic client in question, all requiring the same high level of support and attention.

What started with England Netball’s Roses making the Netball World Cup Final, was quickly followed by not one, but two World Rowing Age Grade Championships, the Under-23 followed by the Under-19, with the U19 a Test Event for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

Sandwiched in between these rowing events, we took to the waves in a different type of vessel, supporting the Olympic Sailing Test regatta in Marseilles. On the other side of the rowing events was World Sailing’s big quadrennial showpiece, the Sailing World Championships.

No sooner had we sailed (or rowed) through those four events, the senior rowing World Championships were upon us in Belgrade, with the conclusion of the action running alongside The Tour of Britain cycling sportive and the commencement of the 2023 Rugby World Cup featuring Sotic clients, Wales and Ireland!

Sotic’s experience of supporting pinnacle events is borne from our long history designing live data engagement tools, starting in the mid-noughties with the first score tracker in rugby’s Six Nations. In 2008 we enabled World Sailing to become one of the first IF’s to carry live timing on their proprietary sites using Olympic Data Feeds, and by 2010 we were firmly established in the rugby union market, driving innovation in the sector. Football, golf, international and county cricket and rugby league followed, with our Leeds Rhinos website being the only site to offer play-by-play coverage of the World Club Challenge in January 2018.

The acquisition of World Rowing in 2019 added a further Olympic sport to our roster, providing us with the opportunity to up our ODF data game. With GPS data now also available, we launched our revolutionary 2D rowing Live Boat Tracker, which visually simulates a six-lane rowing course moving boats across the screen in real-time from start line to finish line, using data fed directly from the boats’ GPS transmitters – to the venue – to Sotic, via World Rowing’s scoring partner Swiss Timing.

Of course, live events are not without their challenges and there will always be edge cases in the data – something we’re always prepared for. With the Sailing events this summer, new race formats for the Windsurfer Marathon meant that the testing window was the live window, and when the sailor qualification for the Olympics is riding on the accuracy of that data, being able to make adjustments calmly, in the heat of 100s of feeds arriving a minute, is something that Sotic’s teams have learned to master.

Our trip around the ‘Worlds’, is not over yet! The Rugby World Cup has more rounds to run, and we dipped our toe back into the water with the World Rowing Beach Sprint Finals last weekend, followed by the World Rowing Coastal Championships this coming weekend (just to make sure we throw a few more ‘Worlds’ in). Did we mention that we also supported three rowing World Cups back in May? Put them aside, there’s only so much of the World to go round!