FlashResults in Carolina muy bueno

I’m positively pleased to share a note I wrote to Roger Jennings at FlashResults, the North Carolina-based timing and results-reporting service that did such a great job in Carolina, Puerto Rico. And I urge like-minded athletes to do the same.


Here’s a portion of a note I sent Roger:
On behalf of all the WMA wannabes who didn’t make it to Carolina — and friends of entrants all over the world — I want to congratulate you on a terrific job posting results at worlds!
The results were posted expeditiously as promised, added extra information such as record breakers and carried all the essential info — age-graded percentage, actual age, open-age equivalent, etc.
Having results in text and piecemeal fashion was great. One could search through the day’s event wrapup and then turn to the full-blown results for more details.

I urge people with similar feelings to write to write to Roger at: rcjennings@flashresults.com and cc the note to WMA vice president-stadia at: rexjh@aol.com. Kudos to meet management as well.
With exception of the lost-in-space M50 200 finals (victim of a lightning strike), we had the most complete and quickly posted online results in the history of WAVA/WMA. This was a huge contrast to the utter botch of results by the 2001 Brisbane world masters meet, which I lampooned on egroups.
In fact, National Masters News ran a column by Al Sheahen saying of Brisbane:
Results were sporadic and very hard to come by. Results of the early days’ cross-country, racewalks, and decathlon/heptathlon didn’t come through for days. After that, daily results, when you could find them, were incomplete.
The staffers in the media center refused to provide complete results for each media outlet, saying it was “too expensive.” Instead, they asked: “What do you need?” and offered to copy that result. But the copier was often busy or out of order. There were only two computers in the media room. After the first few days, the local papers decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and stopped reporting on the event.
In the results summary in this issue are several gaps and holes. Worse, the results are generally organized by age-group, rather than by event, making them harder to read. “The distribution of results was the worst I’ve ever seen at a world or national meet,” said Jerry Wojcik, NMN’s senior editor and results compiler.

Although the Puerto Rico worlds has the smallest turnout in about 20 years, it made the biggest strides in terms of results dissemination — making it possible for me to comment intelligently on the meet and media around the world to cover the action for hometown papers and broadcast outlets.
Here are some of the stories generated on the 15th World Masters Athletic Championships:
A story on M65 walker Stuart Summerhayes.
A story on M50 runner Joe Gough.
An item on M50 thrower Chris Black.
An update on M50 sprinter Wally Franklyn.
A report on M75 sprinter Allan Meddings.
FlashResults helped a bunch in making possible these reports.

Print Friendly

July 16, 2003

One Response

  1. Tom Fahey - July 16, 2003

    I thoroughly enjoyed the meet in Puerto Rico. The competition was professionally run, the bus service was excellent (including the police escorts), and the results were posted in a timely manner. The organizing committee and the volunteers should be given a well-done for their efforts.

Leave a Reply