The Little Known and Long Gone Company That Created the Future of the Olympics

My encounter with Quokka Sports in the 1990s, which ultimately changed my life

When you tune in to Olympics coverage, you probably take for granted all the cool graphics and detailed data that you see on the screen – how fast sprinters run, how a play developed in basketball, the angle of a discus throw.

Twenty-five years ago, none of that existed. But it was envisioned and predicted by a Silicon Valley company most people don’t remember, called Quokka Sports. The company didn’t survive the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, though its influence lives on.

My intersection with Quokka had an enormous impact on my life that I could not have predicted at the time. But more on that in a bit.

I first visited Quokka in 1998, when it was mostly focused on covering competitive sailing. That was its starting point, but even then the company had a vision for a future of digital immersive sports. Two years later, I revisited Quokka for a story after it signed a deal with NBC, which planned to use Quokka to enhance the network’s broadcasts of the 2000 Olympics.

As a journalist covering tech, I was always taken by companies that made me see a future that I hadn’t yet imagined – companies that gave me that classic “a-ha!” moment. That happened at Quokka. The consumer internet was new back then. The vast majority of people who were getting on it were doing so via painfully-slow dial-up modems. It took forever just to download a photo. Video was pretty much out of the question.

Quokka had an insight born in competitive sailing. One of the founders was Australian Al Ramadan, who majored in computer science at Monash University and was an intense athlete who got involved in sailing. In 1992, Al was asked by Australian sailing legend John Bertrand to be chief technologist for Bertrand’s upcoming run at the America’s Cup yacht race.

As Al told me then, Bertrand thought digital technology could give a sailing team an edge. So the team packed their boat with sensors that could send 50 variables to a computer, which in turn could track and analyze the incoming data.

“I’d be standing there during the race with all this information coming into my computer, and I realized all these people were gathered around me watching my screen instead of watching the boats,” Al said, as quoted in the story below.

He realized the onlookers were experiencing a different version of yacht racing than they’d ever seen – an intimate view of a sport that is otherwise far away out on the sea. What if that kind of experience could be available to the public – for sailing or any sport?

After the 1995 America’s Cup (won by New Zealand), Al went to Stanford to take a summer MBA course. The consumer internet was just getting going. Al and Bertrand made plans for a company that could use the internet to cover yacht racing in this new data-intensive way. Eric Schmidt – later of Google fame but then at Sun Microsystems – introduced those two to veteran technologist Dick Williams. Al, Bertrand and Williams founded Quokka in 1996.

By the late 1990s, every entity on earth wanted to get in on the dot-com boom, and that included NBC, which had the rights to the 2000 Summer Games. Yacht racing proved the concept, but NBC realized that what Quokka was doing could work for other sports. Quokka and NBC created NBCOlympics.com, the first internet site to cover the Olympics live. Quokka layered data into coverage of 35 sports, such as swimming and track.

So, what happened to Quokka?

It was a classic case, as we’d say in our work at Category Design Advisors, of getting too far ahead of the adjacent possible.

Technology and the public didn’t catch up to Quokka’s vision in time. In 2000, internet connections were still too slow for a good video experience, and much of the audience just wasn’t used to looking online to watch sports – a chicken and egg problem. The great dot-com crash that started in 2000 devastated Quokka’s stock price and soured investors on internet companies. The economy sank after 9/11 and advertising dried up.

In 2002, Quokka folded. As Al has said to me many times in recent years, if Quokka had been able to get through the storm of those years, today it might be a sports media giant. Instead, the company disappeared - but everything it envisioned has come true.

I liked Al from that first meeting and was fascinated by Quokka. For years after the company folded, any time I was researching a story about sports and technology, I emailed or called Al for his insights. After Quokka, Al had moved on to top positions at Macromedia and Adobe. Around 2011, he teamed up with Christopher Lochhead and Dave Peterson and launched a startup advisory firm called Play Bigger.

A couple years later, I got a call from Al, and he asked me to dinner with his partners. They had some interesting insights from working with startups, and thought that might lead to a book. They wanted to talk with me about it.

I liked what they were saying and the four of us started building on their ideas. We ended up co-authoring the book Play Bigger, which came out in 2016 and introduced the concept we called “category design.” The book has sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, made category design part of the tech ecosystem, and led me to found Category Design Advisors with Mike Damphousse. (Al now runs the Play Bigger firm; Chris preaches category design with his Category Pirates; Dave is semi-retired and working on a professional pickleball career.)

In life, you never know what will lead to what.

Anyway, as a bonus, since Al and I still know each other well, I told him I was writing this and he offered his perspective on our early encounters when he was at Quokka. Here’s what Al sent:

Quokka was one of the hottest tech companies in the Valley in the mid-late 1990s. Investors included Accel Partners, Media Technology Ventures, Intel Capital, Liberty Media, NBC. Our “launch party” at Mission Cliffs climbing gym set a new high for launches in S.F.  The Fire department came by and told half of the crowd to go home and to shut down the F1 car transmitting telemetry to the computers into the Climbing Gym where we displayed the data overlays on the climbing walls.

Two rock climbers scaled the longest pitches transmitting heart rates, XYZ positions and body temp. One jumped off the wall and her heart rate lowered. Most people in the crowd were captivated by the story the data was telling them. The data was, in many cases, more valuable than the live images… How could her heart rate go down when she is about to crash into the ground? (Her belay partner caught her a few feet from the gym floor). 

Caryn Marooney from Outcast Communications had a line of reporters out the door. We were front page.  

But very few of the reporters wanted to know anything other than our latest round of finance.  

Somewhere in that craziness Caryn connected me with Kevin Maney from USA Today. 

Kevin was different.  He wanted to understand the experience we were delivering to sports fans and how it was different to conventional TV and print media. He wanted to know who we were serving. Sailors, Outdoor enthusiasts, extreme sports, etc – people who didn’t get TV coverage other than the occasional mention on Wide World of Sports. 

Remember 1996? Mosaic Browsers. Then Netscape.  Rich media was nascent. Video was impossible. People on dial up modems. Broadband penetration in the single digits… 

Kevin asked a million questions. Probing the experience delivered and who we delivered it too. 

I explained to Kevin that it was the mixing of data overlays, with live images/video coupled with interactivity delivering a new lens on the sporting event. If people were into the “story” they could hear it from the athlete - no reporter in between. If they were into the stats and who was gaining/losing, they could download our “Race Viewers” which gave you a million options to view the event.

If you were into participating you could join a “Virtual Race” not only against your friends but against the actual athletes themselves.

He got it. A fundamentally different way to experience a sporting event. He also got that some of these audiences were of great interest to non-traditional advertisers. 

Kevin wrote the first article in 1998 centering on the Whitbread Round the World Race. That’s when everyone else got it too…