Red Bull X-Alps: helping fans follow the world's toughest adventure race
About Red Bull X-Alps
Red Bull X-Alps is hailed as the world's toughest adventure race. With each edition, competitors from around the globe arrive in Austria for a grueling test of the body and mind. From Salzburg, they make their way only by foot and paraglider to Monaco, navigating over 1000km of treacherous alpine terrain. Zooom Productions GmbH is a full service communications agency with over 20 years experience in outdoor and adventure brands.
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About g-Xperts
g-Xperts specializes in Google Maps and Google Cloud and all their combinations. As a Google My Business Featured Partner it helps companies keep hundreds or thousands of listings up to date on Google, Google Maps, and Google My Business. g-Xperts' clients keep control on how their locations are presented digitally.
The Red Bull X-Alps adventure race from Salzburg, Austria, to Monaco, France, is among the world's most challenging endurance tests. Thirty-two athletes race across the Alps by foot and paraglider, traveling more than 1,000 kilometers. Some participants hike more than 100 kilometers in a single day and gain thousands of meters in altitude. Race organizers needed a mapping solution to build a website that would let millions of people around the world track the race's progress.
Google Maps Platform Results
- The site scaled smoothly to handle traffic spikes during peak race times.
- Compared to 2015, the site saw a 129 percent increase in smartphones use, 25 percent increase in desktop/laptop use and 22 percent increase in tablet use.
- The site worked equally well on mobile devices, desktops and laptops, vital because 60 percent of visitors used mobile devices.
4.2M sessions of the website during the race phase in 2017, an increase of 55 percent over 2015
"With Google Maps, we built an immersive website including live race statistics, real-time location tracking, and video from paragliders, leading to big increases in site traffic compared to previous years."
—Ulrich Grill, Zooom Productions, organizer of the Red Bull X-Alps race"Google Maps helped us build a website to let millions of people follow our paragliding and hiking race across the Alps in real-time, making site visitors feel as if they were really there."
—Hannes Maier, Head of Digital of Zooom Productions, organizer of the Red Bull X-Alps raceRed Bull X-Alps chose Google Maps to build the website, and Google Cloud Platform to do the analytics to calculate race statistics. The Maps JavaScript API displayed the real-time locations of racers on a map and overlaid information from other sources, including video from cameras they carried and race statistics from Google Cloud Platform. To ensure their locations were displayed accurately, the site collected up to three GPS data points per second from each athlete, for a total of one million per athlete during the course of the race. The maps also used the Elevation API to display the elevation of the participants. Google Cloud Premier Partner g-Xperts helped with both the Google Maps and Google Cloud Platform deployments. With Google Maps, the site scaled smoothly to handle any amount of traffic. This was vital because the site was visited 4.2 million times -- an increase of 55 percent compared to 2015. Each session lasted 8 minutes, 43 seconds, an increase of 109 percent from 2015. The site worked equally well on mobile devices, desktops and laptops.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Red Bull X-Alps
Red Bull X-Alps is hailed as the world's toughest adventure race. With each edition, competitors from around the globe arrive in Austria for a grueling test of the body and mind. From Salzburg, they make their way only by foot and paraglider to Monaco, navigating over 1000km of treacherous alpine terrain. Zooom Productions GmbH is a full service communications agency with over 20 years experience in outdoor and adventure brands.
About g-Xperts
g-Xperts specializes in Google Maps and Google Cloud and all their combinations. As a Google My Business Featured Partner it helps companies keep hundreds or thousands of listings up to date on Google, Google Maps, and Google My Business. g-Xperts' clients keep control on how their locations are presented digitally.