A few days ago I finished a 3,000km bike race that began in Oudenarde, Belgium, crossed the Alps and the Pyrenees, and ended, at last, in Bilbao, Spain. The experience was, of course, a little different to beach sprint but during the many hours of alone time on the road, I couldn’t help but wonder how one of the key technologies behind ultra endurance cycling could radically change rowing.
Both rowing and cycling struggle with one of the same challenges: the fans (and potential fans) are usually a long way from the action. Beach sprint brings spectators a little closer, but much of the water phase can be difficult to interpret from the perspective of those waiting on the sand. Great video coverage using drones and livestreaming can help fix that problem, but those sort of solutions can be too complicated or expensive for the majority of regattas. The situation is similar in flatwater rowing, where fans in attendance rarely can see the entire race course, and, because of their viewing angles, can struggle to determine which boat is ahead.
Many ultra endurance cycling races have solved this by handing out a satellite tracker to every participant. Connected to a live web platform, these trackers send regular position updates and allow anyone to watch the athletes make progress across the map. As well as family and friends of the racers, an entire community of “dot watchers” has grown up around these trackers. For comparison, the official @worldrowing.coastal account on Instagram has 10,900 followers, while @dotwatcher.cc has 37,200, more than three times as many. Races that often count fewer than 100 riders and that would have otherwise taken place completely off the radar have built audiences and brought in new participants because of the ease of following the action remotely. (The sponsors gain, too, as everyone visiting the tracking platform sees their ads and logos.)
My own personal experience of the engagement and interaction that this can create includes the 2025 edition of the same Transibérica race that I just repeated. On my ninth day of the road, a French woman tracked me down to a cafe in Tarbes after seeing my tracker passing through her city. I was quickly refueling on coffee and croissants and she simply wanted to cheer me on.
There are many of these tracking platforms, used for cycling, trail running, sailing and other outdoor activities. Search the internet and you might come across Follow My Challenge, Track The Race, Tracmove, Trackleaders, Racemap, TRACX and others. Some rely on full satellite trackers, devices that send position data directly to satellites above, and that don’t communicate via cell networks. However many use more lightweight devices that obtain their position information from GPS but transmit data by phone connection. The key benefit of this second option is quicker update times and longer battery life, but in remote areas the coverage can become problematic.
Some of the most popular devices are asset trackers made by Queclink. These weren’t exactly designed for ultra endurance sports, but instead to help shipping companies keep track of trucks and containers out there in the real world. They are little rectangular devices about 8cm long, 4cm wide and 2.5cm deep, and that weigh in at less than 100g. Interestingly, they also have inbuilt accelerometers, which perhaps could be used to extract stroke rate data in the same way that many modern speed coach devices do.
Their location accuracy is around 2m, which is likely acceptable for rowing. The frequency of position reporting can apparently only be dropped as low as once per second, but that might also be O.K. A beach sprint race consists of about 100m of running on the sand and 500m rowing on the water, and takes around 2.5 minutes, and so on average we could get position data every 4m. A fast, 6:00 2,000m flat water race would get position data roughly every 5.5m. That wouldn’t be enough for official results, but the trackers could still give a very interesting picture (live and online) of any race up until the athletes crossed the finish line. In beach sprint, in particular, we’d be able to compare the different paths each boat takes around the course. (And if we’re putting trackers on the boats, we could do the exact same with the buoys themselves. to get a better reference of where those turning points are.)
There are cost and complexity issues related to doing all of this, but those don’t really seem prohibitive given that these technologies are tried and tested in another sport. Each device costs around 100€, and needs an active cell subscription. But a beach sprint event really only needs a handful of these, in the same way as there are only a handful of boats in use. Four trackers plus two backups might be enough. And they’d get reused many times at other regattas. (Flat water regattas could be more complicated, with many more boats on the water at any one time.)
Unfortunately, I don’t have the technical knowhow or resources to build this, at least not alone. But I do know that the outcome of adopting a system like this could be revolutionary for our sport.
Fans would be able to watch the dots live from any regatta around the world. When there’s also a livestream, they’d dual-screen to back up the images with the data. And when physically in attendance at a regatta, they’d still have their phones in hand so that they could see what’s really going on out there. Athletes, coaches and commentators would go back and watch data replays to gain insights, and suddenly we’d be talking about things like straight-line and turn speeds, outbound and inbound splits, how one athlete’s slalom was demonstrably superior, and how another caught a wave and made up time on the return. Sponsors would surely pay for impressions on those data screens, bringing in critical investment, and the statistics could even, in a more distant future, empower sports betting. Beach sprint would have finally grown up into the modern, data-fueled sports world.