This season’s UIAA World Ice Climbing Tour continued to feature some star-studded performances from many of the world’s leading climbers. However, there was also a notable development away from the ice, with the introduction of Vertical-Life’s (VL) results system helping to shape and improve coverage and live data from the competition.
Based in Brixen, in the Italian province of South Tyrol, VL envisions and develops innovative software solutions for the climbing industry. Since its foundation in 2013, the company has become the world’s largest platform of its kind for climbing with the goal of connecting the global community. Besides the Result Service for international competition scoring, its products include an application for climbers, the Smart Climbing Gym route setting & gym management software, and more.
The VL software integrated into the 2019-2020 UIAA Ice Climbing World Tour featured a number of developments and changes. Among these were the ability to show live rankings on big screens at the events which provided spectators and athletes greater clarity when following the competition. “A further benefit was to route judges, who were able to score athletes using tablets, meaning all scores appeared in the rankings, the website as well as the live screen the moment they were inserted,” explains Ben Lepensant of VL. Meanwhile, online registrations as well as license applications were done through the VL Result Service which led to an increase in efficiency of workflow, while each result service manager had their own individual account which in turn created greater transparency and a better overview of who did what on the system.”
“This new online system means that the athletes, their friends and families and fans of the sport can see the scores live as soon as each competitor as finished their climb providing a new interaction to the sport that we didn’t have previously,” adds UIAA Sport Events Coordinator Rob Adie.
BENEFITS FOR UIAA MEMBERS
There are a number of exciting potential innovations for the season ahead as Lepensant explains: “The system could be extended to UIAA national federations in order for them to carry out ice climbing events with up to date UIAA rules and an easy to use results service, while payments for licences and registrations could be included in the system to further reduce the workload for both the UIAA and the federations themselves”. Plans also include the possibility of creating athlete bios and displaying their statistics which would enable both fans to follow their favourite climbers more easily and the sport of competition ice climbing to continue evolving on and off the ice.
Further Reading
Vertical-Life
UIAA Ice Climbing World Tour
Main photo: Start lists and results are produced for UIAA Ice Climbing competitions by Vertical-Life.
