A student’s idea for an app enabling quicker access to the profiles of Olympic athletes has drawn the attention of the organising committee for the 2020 Tokyo Games, backed by hopes that it will meet the changing needs of modern sports fans.
The app idea, proposed by Eisuke Sugitani, a 20-year-old junior at Doshisha University in the western Japan city of Kyoto, provides athlete profiles to users who hold their smartphones to focus on particular athletes’ faces on television.
The committee picked the idea as the best in a student ideas contest for new media for the global sporting event.
Sugitani got the idea for the app when he thought about how to familiarise Japanese sports viewers with foreign athletes.
The problem must be the same for foreign fans watching Japanese athletes, he said.
