The Quokka Total Sports Experience
By Shawn Connally
Many people follow sports on the Web. But for most, it's a passive experience: They read about sporting events, check scores, or get stats on their favorite athletes much as they would with a print newspaper or magazine. One Australian company, Quokka Sports, offers more than simple online Associated Press-type articles. With its Total Sports Immersion concept, Quokka lets visitors participate in events at interactive sailing and adventure-sports sites.
Recently, Quokka created a stir with its coverage of the 1997-98 Whitbread Round The World yachting race at www.whitbread.org, which not only provided an up-to-the minute account of the event, but also gave visitors a chance to virtually race with each other. The event garnered over 768 million hits from around the world, averaging 4.8 million hits and 811,000 page views per day.
The site brought the sailing experience home to Web surfers with photographs, streaming video and audio, close-to-real-time position reports, and an online race viewer that let visitors see the exact location of the fleet at any given moment, anywhere in the world (see
Figure 1). (The race is over, but the site will remain available through December 1998.)
Quokka has recently gone live with its next sailing event, Around Alone 1998-99, at www.aroundalone.com. Around Alone is a 27,000-mile solo yacht race around the world.<>
