Germany - The long-distance triathlon is one of the most gruelling of all athletic disciplines, comprising a 3.8-kilometre swim followed by 180 kilometres on the bike and a full 42.2-kilometre marathon; yet year after year the number of participants grows - as, indeed, do the crowds lining the routes. A particular favourite with athletes as well as spectators is the Roth Challenge, the world's biggest long-distance marathon, which is staged annually in the rural district of Roth, just south of Nuremberg in Bavaria. In 2012, for the first time, the European Triathlon Union awarded the European Long-Distance Championships to the Roth Marathon and its sister event, the Half-Distance European Championships, to the Challenge Kraichgau in Baden-Wurttemberg.
In Roth, on 8 July, around 5,000 athletes lined up at the start, while over 200,000 spectators, taking advantage of the ideal weather conditions, watched the event unfold over the course of some sixteen hours. To ply this giant crowd with information such as intermediate times and positions during the race as well as with musical entertainment at its conclusion was a tall order for the team charged with providing the sound reinforcement.
For the fourth year in a row, therefore, the sound production for this event, as well as for the European Half-Distance Triathlon Championships in Kraichgau, was entrusted to the Nuremberg-based firm of Barowski AG by the general contractor, events agency Vitolico, which is itself based in Roth.
Once again the team led by MD Michael Barowski relied on systems from Dynacord and Electro-Voice. A key role was played by the Electro-Voice audio systems at the start of the swimming leg. It was a powerful Cobra system from Dynacord however, that provided the sound reinforcement in the market square as the Bayern 3-Band helped athletes and spectators celebrate after the race.
Course-side during the cycling stage, an Electro-Voice XLD system at Solarer Berg proved the solution. "We had, in all, 26 XLD291 and XLD281 enclosures concatenated to form line arrays," explains Barowski, "but to cover the entire stretch, we had to hoist them eighteen metres into the air using a crane." These were supported by six XS-212 subwoofers and four Dx46 sound system processors as well as eight CP3000S and six CP400S power amplifiers (all from Electro-Voice)."
Managing Director Michael Barowski was highly encouraged by the way both events turned out. "The Challenge Roth this year broke all attendance records, whilst at the Challenge Kraichgau thunderous applause greeted a new course record. In each case, the sound systems installed made light of the difficulties of providing competitors and spectators alike with high-quality sound reinforcement."
The feedback from members of the Bayern 3-Band, the organizers and the general contractor, VITOLICO, was uniformly positive. As a result, the contracts for next year's Challenge Roth and Challenge Kraichgau productions are already "signed, sealed and delivered".
