How does a hybrid indoor rowing event work?

The 2024 World Rowing Indoor Championships in Prague, Czechia is a hybrid event with athletes able to compete in person or from anywhere in the world. Bringing this all together is no easy feat. To make it work World Rowing brought in the expertise of Dutch-based regatta timing company, Time Team.

Time Team started 15 years ago out of a rowing club in the Dutch city of Groningen. Harm Hermsen and Alexander Hoogerheide started putting together software for the timing and regatta management at local club regattas.

“We kept developing the software and started using the internet to publish live results,” says Hermsen. The duo caught the eye of Amsterdam’s international race the Holland Beker and it was not long before Time Team was doing regattas throughout the Netherlands with indoor rowing events being added to the list.

“Concept2 saw what we were doing and invited us to assist at the CRASH-Bs in Boston.” More indoor regattas then took Time Team on board.

With the Covid-19 Pandemic Time Team’s business came to a screeching halt as regattas and other events were cancelled. With nothing else to do the Team came up with a remote racing proof of concept after just two weeks.

They developed ‘HomeRace’ for people to be able to race each other remotely from their homes. This would become the basis of post-covid hybrid events.

First to pick up the software was British Rowing who set up the British Rowing Virtual Indoor Championships.

“It was quite big,” says Hermsen. “About 1200 competitors joined from all over the world.”

The software is designed to link up the rowing machines being used in a specific race so that competitors and spectators can follow in real time the position of the athletes and the finishing times. For hybrid events the software must link to individual locations around the world.

Prior to an event Time Team gathers information on each competitor, checks they have the right monitor on their indoor rowing machine, checks the strength of their internet connection, creates links for competitors to share their webcam and send out an individual code for each competitor. This code allows the competitor to get into their race, it logs in the erg and enables Time Team to take control of their Performance Monitor.

During the race every competitor can see their position on their monitor and competitors at the venue can see themselves against the remote competitors.

“This is what makes the racing in real time so interesting,” says Hermsen. “The racers can see where they are and anticipate each other and do moves against their competitors. It’s real race interaction between the athletes.”

Breaks in internet connections can be a problem as well as connection delays.

“We have a global clock and we can correct for latency even if, say, one person’s connection is slow. The ergs themselves are recording the score. If someone goes offline for 2 – 3 seconds we can still get them back in the race.We have quite a bit of buffer. If they come back online before they finish they are counted. After that they’re excluded from the race.”

This is because a winner of the race needs to be declared at the race conclusion. It’s part of the rules of racing, says Hermsen.

During the World Rowing Indoor Championships Hermsen says if he’s drinking coffee it means things are going well. Time Team are onsite in Prague with six people. One will be running the Versa Challenge, there’s two race operators, operating the specific race line. There’s a race coordinator collecting and managing the results and making sure races start on time. Two people work with the broadcasters getting the live race stream out. Time Team also supply the graphics used by broadcasters.

“Then there’s room for coffee,” says Hermsen.

Watch the 2024 World Rowing Indoor Championships, presented by Concept2 live on World Rowing’s YouTube page.