Denmark Sees New Sporting Legacy On Event Horizon

by Lars Lundov and Thomas Capitani

In a world of global social media the legacy of international sporting events is no longer just about what it does for the host city or country, but also what it does for the sport worldwide, Sport Event Denmark’s chief executive believes.

It is the ‘ask not what sport can do for your country, but what your country can do for sport’ rallying cry that governing bodies across the world say is most important to them.

“To develop the sport and expand the numbers of viewers and participators and make them more global must be a key aim,” Lars Lundov, the chief executive of Sport Event Denmark, says.

“We always try to add something extra into our bids. In general we have a very strong governmental support both on a central and local level. But when we are talking about hosting the event in the traditional way with those guarantees, we are also trying to add something extra for the rights holder. For instance, with the new technology of tracking for sailing and the way that is combined with social media for the spectator.”

That golden thread of innovation has been part of every bid Sport Event Denmark has launched and the results are that 2011 will see some of the biggest sports events ever in Denmark; the UCI Road World Championships and the UEFA European Under-21 Championship.

They are the pinnacle of much broader base of World and European championships in other sports. They will also come at a time after Denmark has thought big in small events and had the chance to experiment and refine new technologies to use in the higher pressure environments.

One of the biggest sources of waste and criticism for large events around the world is the closed, proprietary technology that is often so long in the planning that it is out of date by the time the event starts. But Denmark has focused on integrating open media - twitter, facebook, youtube - that everyone is using already for free. Newer, free live streaming platforms such as Bambuser have augmented this.

“Social media makes that six degrees of separation possible for sailing,” Thomas Capitani, executive director of Sailing Aarhus, says. “It works for events that would never be televised. And even if we make only three degrees of separation, that’s still half the world.“

It means that Capitani, who is planning the suddenly spotlighted A-Cat World Championships this summer, is confident that they will be able to handle the increased exposure and demands of an event which was much smaller in 2008 when they won the bid. The change to catamarans from monohulls in the America’s Cup has meant the world’s best sailors have gravitated towards the A-Cat class as a means of training.

“James Spithill (The leading Australian America’s Cup helmsman) asked for wildcard last week,” Capitani reveals, “and the Australia A-Cat championships (in January), which are often seen as a barometer for the World Championships, had some of the biggest America’s Cup names.”

Aarhus is a prime example of the Lundov legacy vision. As one of the four host cities for the UEFA European Under-21 Championship, it will be able to demonstrate and build on the unusually strong bonds between the city, the sport federations and the university. But it will also have a chance to showcase to a wider audience the technical innovations it has made, which in turn will make even a sport as widely followed as football more accessible. It is that sort of experience that Aarhus hopes will win them the bid for the 2014 ISAF World Sailing Championships with sailing hoping and needing to grow globally to remain in the Olympic programme.

“One of the advantages we have in Aarhus is that we are working together with the university,” Capitani says. “Now we are not the only ones working with the new technology sailing, but most sail event organisers are working with private companies, who have mainly commercial interests and only want to use their existing set-up. Whereas, Rasmus Johnsen (of the social enterprise body Active Institue) and his team at the university are not afraid of testing out new things.”

Johnsen sees 2011 as a turning point for showing that the technology made in Denmark is making sport not only more viewable, understandable and sharable, but also affordable.

“We have built a strong network that we will hopefully be expanding in 2011 to a Nordic co-operation, initially with knowledge institutions and businesses from, respectively, Gothenburg and Oslo,” Johnsen says. “It is becoming ever easier and cheaper to collect, process, present and share large amounts of data, which in turn means that the basis for exposing sports is changing radically. Every sport has an opportunity to redefine itself in terms of how to expose and communicate the action. This has gigantic potential, especially for sports that are hard to follow.”

That is the mixture of global and local legacy that Lundov believes must be at the heart of all sport events.

Dansk Sejlunion