VIII. Gay Games Cologne 2010

From 6 pm on, it´s getting busy in the small, dark room of the sports office at the RheinEnergieStadium. There, in the in the flat building on the right side of the stadium, the so called result service is residing. This is Oliver Zeisberger. He leads the working group IT at the Gay Games Cologne together with Jens Wiesner. Wiesner´s main emphasis is on the control of Etix, a provider of electronic tickets. Zeisberger´s task is to collect the interim and final results of each sport and to publish them on www.games-cologne.de. As many events finish around 7 pm, it gets a bit busier. “Furthermore there are a lot of differences in our work” explains Zeisberger. For example, the events of the ballroom dancing were held till deep into the night. “But I stop working at 3 am. If results aren´t available at this time we just put them online during the next morning.”  Tennis doesn´t take that long, but here the interim results are very important. Out of them the pairing for the next day are placed.

The result service receives most of the results via mail, prepares them and puts them online at www.games-cologne.de. “Some sports like the swimmers have their own webpage with result service. They put the results online themselves and just inform us” says Zeisberger. Others provide pdf documents, which he just has to place online. When he´s receiving an excel table, that means more work for Zeisberger. “At the bodybuilding competition we were even on-site to pick up handwritten papers. We put these notes in a file form to upload on our website.” Not everything runs smooth due to the amount of results – some faults are provided but no wonder at the massive number of results we have to process. Nevertheless, Zeisberger is proud: “As far as I know, here in Cologne it´s the first time at the Gay Games that an up-to-date result service is provided”, he says. In the past it often took like a week to see the final results online.”