Who and why?

Idea for forecasting result service for combined events originates from European Championships in Helsinki 1994. Matti Laurila developed the idea at that time. For the 2005 World Championships the combined events team wanted to offer this service again. Idea was to offer the service on the Internet not only for the media but for everyone interested in combined events.

I took up the challenge to create the code for the service and many nights have since passed with far too few hours of sleep. Now that the service is finally (almost) ready I am extremely glad to offer you the service that I always would have wanted to use myself.

We tested the first version of the service at the European Cup Combined Events - 1st League Jyväskylä 2005 competition. I got the last lines of code in place only one day before the competition and was not expecting too many users for the service. It came as a supprise that there were around 2000 users on the second day. This was a good motivation to continue the development process and the service has exploded since.

I am sure that my code is not the most effective but hopefully it will work well enough. I would like to thank especially Teemu Harju for his contribution to the code and also Jaakko for his help on the mobile RSS reader. I guess I should not thank other volunteers since we are just doing our job but still I would like to name two other combined event team members: Pekka and Jukka Nurmi. They have been testing eagerly the service and they have also collected the needed results. THANKS!

Hopefully you will enjoy the service,

Matti Vesterinen
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