There has never been a single reference archive for triathlon results within the UK but, from today, that situation will change. The deal that we have done with the British Triathlon Federation is intended to be the start of a national results service that will collate data from any event that happens within the UK and stores that information, not as a web page, table or printed document but as records in a database.

When we started Tri247.com at the beginning of the year we built into the system the capability for a linked event and results database. The event database lists what is happening and, through our association with Active allows event organisers to offer online entry, while the results database stores the results for those events. While that may seem obvious, and it is..., what is different is that we have defined all the possible stages of any race together with details about the competitors in a standardised format. When an organiser submits their results we take this information and convert it into the form our database understands.

This process gives us a complete record (well, as complete as the data we are provided with allows) for each competitor in the race. As the database starts to fill up it will be possible to create an account on Tri247 and to search for and find all your results and then allocate these to your personal record. Over time you will be able to compare performances year on year or across a series event all from within a single login.

But, what of the past? Well, we maintained a pretty good set of results on the old Triathletes Homepage site and these are slowly being converted across to the new system plus we are scouring the web for other sources of data such as StuWeb and UK Results who are kindly letting us have access to their archives as well. If you have data on club websites or on old files do please let us know, we can cope with almost any format! The aim is to get back to at least 2000 and we do have some data from the 1990s as well that is in electronic format. Any serious offers of help with this project will not go unrewarded!

So, that's the plan and, starting today (well, we actually started in January on an unofficial basis) there really is only one place to come for events listsings and results and that's here at Tri247.com. Of course, you'll get all the latest news, features, reviews and comments as well but we know what you want, what you really, really want -- is events and results!

Event organisers looking to submit results to Tri247 can find a set of detailed instructions here which will explain the data formats and content we require.