The greatest sporting show on earth deserves a results service to match. No mean feat given the 28 sports, 37 disciplines, 193 countries, 35 venues and 25,000 individual athletes involved.

Working with our long-standing client BBC Sport, our task was to create a system for Athens 2004 that could stand up to the rigorous Olympic schedules and generate data-rich dynamic graphics accurately and reliably.

At the heart of our solution was a new, portable PC-based system, using the latest computing and 3D graphics techniques. A choice of modern enterprise servers and cross-platform, open-standard technology such as Unix, Java, SQL and XML, made the system into a cost-effective, high performance and high availability computing platform.

The system stored a comprehensive set of graphic templates on PC and automatically updated a database with a stream of results from the organising body. Producers could instantly call-up the latest results from the database, browse the templates to easily find the information they were interested in and then create graphics in real time. Throughout the course of the event, the system received over 280,000 messages from the organisers and created over 2000 graphics. We're not sure if this is an Olympic record, but it surely earns us a quick twirl on the podium. "Once again BBC Broadcast (now Red Bee Media) has upgraded BBC Sport's information and results graphics. Faster, flexible, readable and, most importantly, accurate - excellent job and much appreciated."
Martin Hopkins OBE, Executive Producer Olympics, BBC Sport