Manx Telecom has issued an apology to Parish Walk competitors and their supporters after unprecedented demand for the timing website meant that split times were unavailable for most of Saturday’s event. All Manx Telecom Parish Walk competitors carry timing chips and when they register at checkpoints their times are usually updated automatically on the www.mt.im/parishwalk website using technology provided by sports timing specialists SPORTident. There were 36,676 hits on the parishwalk.com website on Saturday, almost three times the figure for the 2011 event when there were 12,553 hits, which led to technical problems with the SPORTident site.
David Smith, Marketing Director for Manx Telecom, said: “We have sponsored the SPORTident timing system for the Parish Walk since 2007 and it has proved very popular for anyone wanting to track the progress of friends and family taking part. Unfortunately, due to a significant increase in website traffic this year SPORTident experienced technical problems which prevented times from being updated. The system was still able to collate accurate times for each walker and send updates via our text messaging system, but the technical issue at SPORTident prevented this information from being uploaded to the website. As title sponsor of the Manx Telecom Parish Walk we can only apologise to everyone who was relying on the SPORTident website to track the progress of walkers. We appreciate the inconvenience and annoyance caused by this problem and shall conduct a full review to prevent it occurring again. However, the number of hits on the timing website underlines the increasing popularity of the event and overall we were delighted with our first year of sponsorship. The Manx Telecom Parish Walk continues to grow in popularity and we thank everyone who took part in what is a fantastic sporting and community occasion.”
In response to the timing system problems Manx Telecom set up a special emergency link for the media to access up to date information during the event on Saturday, whilst SPORTident emailed an update and apology directly to all competitors. Results were published on the www.parishwalk.com website and all social media channels on Sunday.
Manx Telecom reports that the live GPS tracking system carried by some of the leading walkers worked well and for the first time in the event’s long history fans were able to follow their progress every step of the way online via www.mt.im/tracking with the new system seeing over 40,000 page impressions over the duration of the race.
This system provided live information about the locations of the top three finishers Richard Gerrard, Vinny Lynch, and Michael George as the record-breaking trio battled it out in the most exciting finish ever seen in the Parish Walk.
28 Manx Telecom staff took part in the walk which attracted a record number of 1,819 entrants. It is expected that all those taking part in this year’s Manx Telecom Parish Walk will raise around ?600,000 for charities.
Full results of the walk can be viewed on www.parishwalk.com and results with checkpoint times are available here http://www.sportident.co.uk/results/2012/ParishWalk/ParishWalk2012Results.pdf.
