More than 260,000 votes were cast in The World Games Athlete of the Year 2017 vote. This record-supported race was tighter and more exciting than ever before! The two best – Sport Climber Reza Alipourshenazandifar (90,790 votes) and Powerlifter Larysa Soloviova (90,036) were in their own league, but positive trends could be seen lower down the list too. Fans of candidates such as England Tug of War team (3,289), Waterski jumper Natallia Berdnikava (3,827) and the Dancing couple Anna Miadzielec and Jacek Tarczylo (7,020) fought fiercely to the very end.
Whole countries involved
This year, several countries worked hard to get their favourite selected as Athlete of the Year. In Colombia, even TV campaigns were held for Speed Skater Fabriana Arias, who at the end finished third (48,014) in the race. In Iran, you could get to the voting page directly from several internet newspapers. During January, 35 % of The World Games webpage visitors came from Iran and 14 % from Colombia! Third most active were the fans in the USA, 10 % of all visitors. On 31 January, 44 % of visitors to the webpage came from Iran (compare: Russia 19 %, USA 13 % - and Colombia down to 1.18 %). All in all, votes were cast from more than 180 countries.
15,000 visitors at once!
The voting was so intense on the last day of the race that the IWGA webpage actually gave up at one point – it could not handle the 15,000 people visiting the site at the same time! We quickly updated from 1 server to 2, then 4 and finally 6, and the webpage was back up and running and the voting could continue. The webpage was visited by close to 160,000 people on that day. The second busiest day in January was the 15th with 44,000 visitors.