OpenTrack News: 2025 Has Begun
We're in more countries than ever, and we're only just getting started
With the festive break finished, the 2025 season is well and truly up and running, and we’re thrilled to be hosting more athletics than ever before.
We’re ready for non-stop action all the way through to the end of September, with more countries than ever before using OpenTrack to make their lives easier.
In this update:
Welsh Cross Country Championships
British Masters Pentathlon & 3000 metres
Competition in Saudi Arabia
OpenTrack improvements
With nearly a million pageviews in the past week, and competition organisers making use of all OpenTrack has to offer in at least eight countries, have a read through the best of the action from the last seven days, and a few improvements below.
Welsh Cross Country Championships
The 2024 Welsh Cross Country Championships took place in Pembrey Country Park, near Llanelli, with 5% of the event’s 120 editions now having been hosted on OpenTrack.
Lauren Cooper took home the women’s title by a healthy margin, showing range over the 7.73 kilometre course just a week on from taking a national 1500 metres bronze indoors.
Dewi Griffiths reclaimed the title he last won in 2023 in the men’s race, returning from a 2024 season spent wholly on the road to beat Thomas Chaston by five seconds.
The Welsh Championships made great use of OpenTrack’s configurable scoring, which you can read more about here. You can read a full report from the event by Welsh Athletics here.
British Masters Pentathlon & 3000 metres
Also in the UK, the British Masters Indoor Pentathlon and 3K Championships saw over 300 masters athletes take to the track in Sheffield.
Record-breaking 3000 metres performances
Always keenly contested, the 3000 metre races saw men’s and women’s British, European, and world records broken.
Colin Spivey claimed the vacant British M90 record in the mens’ 75+ race, with 17:48.30 a shade faster than the existing M85 record (17:49.57).
In running nearly 20 seconds faster than the 18:06.97 world record of Antonio Nacca of Italy, the Northern Masters athlete has claimed the European and world records at M90, subject to ratification.
In the women’s 50+ race, Sarah Roberts produced an outstanding performance to break the British W75 record by nearly three minutes, and the European and world record by nearly two minutes, her 12:35.83 also slightly faster than the British and European W70 record of 12:37.45 held by Angela Copson.
Combined events glory
For the combined eventers, a trio of British records fell.
The M70+ pentathlon saw Alistair Hill’s 3268 points over five events best the previous mark of 3062 held by Tony Bowman, while Diana Norman (W50) and Sally Hine (W75) both claimed British bests in the women’s 50+ competition.
Norman’s 4422 points in her new age group improves on the previous W50 mark by almost 1000 points, making her the owner of both the W45 and W50 bests, while Hine’s 3111 points ensured she established a record in an age group previously vacant.
Competition in Saudi Arabia
It’s not cold everywhere in the world, and fresh from joining OpenTrack only a few weeks ago, the Saudi Arabian federation are already making use of OpenTrack’s automated combined events scoring, for an outdoors women’s U20 heptathlon.
With plenty more to come through our partnership with Saudi Arabia, whether it be competitions across the kingdom, Arabic language support, or enhanced federation management tools, watch this space!
OpenTrack improvements
Whilst competition organisers have been hard at work making athletics happen, we’ve also been working behind the scenes to make life even easier.
Recent improvements include collated start list and result PDFs for combined events, allowing you to print out exactly what you need, and improvements to our World Athletics Calendar integration to allow the smooth flow of data between us and the global governing body.
Federation administrators now have an enhanced suite of tools at their disposal to merge athletes, avoiding pesky data duplication, whilst we’ve also been working to improve the relay entry journey, following on from our recent improvements that allowed multiple team managers to pay for their club’s teams.
There’s plenty more to come, and things aren’t likely to slow down, so make sure you keep an eye on OpenTrack for all the important competitions over the indoor season!
As always, if you have any feedback, requests, or want help bringing your athletics into the 21st century, feel free to get in touch at info@opentrack.run.