Real‑time results analytics for 15,000 Almaty Marathon participants

The Courage to Be The First Foundation has organized sporting events in Kazakhstan since 2012. More than 200,000 people have participated in the foundation’s races. With the help of Yessen & Company, specialists in data analytics, the foundation has developed a solution for athletes and fans to instantly access race results. The company provides participants and viewers with access to intermediate and final results in the form of dashboards in Yandex DataLens. During the 2024 Almaty Marathon, the fund monitored the performance of 15,000 participants in real time. The results at the start, finish and checkpoints were available by the participants’ gender, age, home country and city. It was possible to monitor the average time over the course and performance over different periods.

The Courage to Be The First Corporate foundation organizes marathons, half-marathons, and other races, and creates sports merchandise for runners. The foundation holds more than a dozen sporting events each year. The first, flagship race, the Almaty Marathon, stimulated the growth of the number of running clubs and contributed to the development of Almaty’s sports infrastructure. Since 2022, the foundation has also been holding events in Astana and in Turkestan. The 2024 Almaty Marathon brought together 15,000 participants from 62 countries and 300 cities. In total, the runners ran 630,000 kilometers. More than 2,000 volunteers took part in organizing the marathon.

With increasing numbers of events and expanding geography, organizers were faced with the need to gather and publish a large amount of information. These include athletes’ names and surnames, their starting numbers and places at the finish line, the cities, countries, and clubs they represent, and their times at various checkpoints, including at the finish line. In addition, they needed statistics on the average time at different distances, on the number and geography of race participants. The company needed a partner capable of ensuring uninterrupted data gathering, processing, and analysis. Yessen & Company was chosen to implement the project. Since 2016, the company has been developing analytics and visualization systems that make it easy to extract information and make data-based decisions.

The fund had not used cloud technologies before, but the main requirements for the project were high availability and quick analytics, so Yessen & Company opted for cloud infrastructure. Thanks to scalability, the availability of managed services, and extensive integration options, the cloud made it possible to quickly launch projects and accurately estimate costs.

There were several reasons the project team chose Yandex Cloud. For visualization, they decided to use Yandex DataLens. The service integrates with object storage and managed databases, which speed up launches into production. In addition, the Community service plan allows you to build charts and dashboards for free, as well as aggregate data, create calculated fields, and build SQL queries. And Yandex Cloud data platform services help reduce the time and costs of maintaining databases and organizing object storage.

The Almaty Marathon, held at the end of September 2024, was the largest sporting event in Central Asia. 15,000 runners participated. In addition to the flagship Almaty Marathon, the foundation conducts half-marathons and other types of races. The Yessen & Company partner provides real-time data from race participants and records not just the finish results, but also indicators at various checkpoints. Each participant’s start number has a time-tracking chip. Data from chips is collected using Mylaps Portable Decoder, special equipment used in mass races, swims, and other sporting events. Sensors are placed at the start and finish, as well as at checkpoints at certain distances. Data from Mylaps is exported to an FTP server.

Data from the FTP server is converted using a Python script. The hours, minutes, and seconds are converted to numerical format (number of seconds), and data from different disciplines are reduced to general logic for calculating average race times and keeping statistics for gender, age, countries, cities, and runners' clubs. In addition, the script translates information for display on the dashboard in Kazakh, Russian, and English. The data processed by the script is transferred to a Managed Service for PostgreSQL cluster, where it is then sent to Yandex DataLens to build dashboards. Dashboard images are stored in Yandex Object Storage. Yandex DataLens reports show participants’ data, statistics by their city and country of origin, and their age range. This information is updated every minute during races.

In total, our project took five weeks to complete. During this time, we thought through the logic of transferring data to the PostgreSQL cluster, wrote code, and implemented visualization directly on our site using DataLens. Now the solution is ready and is fully in use in the fund’s activities.

Real-time event data is available on the site for everyone: project participants and partners, foundation staff, and media representatives. The Foundation noted the usability of the services, the large number of functions available, and the cost transparency: it is convenient to monitor spending on each service in Yandex Cloud Billing.

In the future, the company and its partner plan to integrate reports with other Yandex services, with Yandex Translate in particular for dashboards in three languages: Kazakh, Russian, and English — and Yandex Weather to display the forecast on the day of the event.

* Photo provided by the Almaty Marathon Press Service