Chennai techies create website to track Indian athletes at Olympics

Niranjan S, Anthony, Gunasekaran, Dheeraj, Sakthivel, Jeganath, Kishore, Sankara Srinivasan and Giridharan work for the same IT company. They had first met during the six-month training programme held for freshers, after which they were posted in different locations. “We are all into web development and all of us wanted to indulge in something apart from office work. First, we decided to create a car-pooling app but we realised that it had been already done by employees from another IT company,” explains Niranjan, a sports enthusiast. 

With the growing buzz around the Rio Olympics, they decided to check out details about the Indian contingent and realised the absence and subsequent need for a platform that had all the information on the Indian representation. Thus was born Roar India Rio. “We decided to create a one-stop destination for everything related to India’s Rio athletes. Our website has a list of all the sporting events that India is participating in. Once you click these tabs, you can see the names of the sportsmen or sportswomen participating,” says Niranjan, adding, “About 60 to 70 per cent of the work involved was with respect to collecting the data. We wanted to keep the design simple. Once the games start, we will have a scoreboard in place where you can see and analyse the performance of Indians.” So far, the website has profiled about 120 athletes, says Niranjan. He adds that for a layperson who doesn’t hold keen interest in sports, Roar India Rio with its back-to-basics format, can be a starting point. The idea was also to bring the fans closer to the athletes by sharing interesting anecdotes from their lives. 

“You can also read about their personal details and their achievements. There are so many facets to them. Players like Dipa Karmakar and Mohan Kumar are an inspiration. Dipa is the first woman to represent India in gymnastics and her story is incredible. Then, we have our Chennai boy from Ambattur, Mohan, who beat all odds to reach Rio,” explains Niranjan. Building the website has also been a learning experience for the team. One of the patterns they noticed was a clustering of athletes in certain regions. “For instance, out of 36 sportspersons who qualified for athletics, seven were from Haryana and nine from Kerala. Similarly, six out of eight wrestlers were from Haryana and four out of seven badminton players from Telangana and Andhra Pradesh,” informs Niranjan. Roar India Rio has over 28,000 clicks from over 32 countries and they are expecting to engage more people in the coming days.