BBC World Service launches interactive Olympics module in 15 languages

With 30 days to go until the Olympics, BBC World Service is launching Athletes Like You, an interactive module which enables users to match their height and weight with the body dimensions of any of the 1,800 Olympic medallists from the 2008 Beijing Games. The module will be available via 15 of BBC World Service’s language websites. 

Athletes Like You is an innovative interactive visualisation with a strong social-media component, encouraging the user to share the match on Facebook and Twitter. The visualisation also allows further exploration of a large database of athletes.  

BBC World Service Development Editor, Dmitry Shishkin, says:  “Athletes Like You adds to a wide range of digital products that the BBC’s language services have been publishing in the run-up to the Olympics.  We are delighted that this project, generated and executed by BBC World Service, also later will be made available to the English-speaking audiences of the international news site, BBC.com.”

Athletes Like You launches today across some of BBC World Service’s language service websites including: bbcafrique.com (French for Africa), bbcarabic.com, bbcbrasil.com, bbcchinese.com and bbcukchina.com; bbchausa.com, bbchindi.com, bbcmundo.com (Spanish), bbcpersian.com, bbcrussian.com, bbcswahili.com, bbcturkce.com, bbcukranian.com, bbcurdu.com, bbcuzbek.com and bbcvietnamese.com.