Event Operations

Open Masters Games Abu Dhabi 2026

End-to-end event operations for a 30-sport international games

100+

Personnel Managed

30

Sports

12+

Countries

5

Custom Tools Built

The Challenge

The Open Masters Games Abu Dhabi 2026 was an international multi-sport competition for athletes aged 30+ spanning 30 sports—athletics, swimming, judo, cricket, football, dragon boat racing, and more. The event required a production crew of over 100 people sourced from multiple countries, each needing contracts, flights, accreditation, and on-the-ground coordination.

The logistics pipeline was massive: individual and agency contracts, international flights across multiple currencies, purchase order management, accreditation submissions to the event's official platform, and daily reporting once competition started. No off-the-shelf system could handle the full pipeline, and manual coordination at this scale was a recipe for missed flights and unpaid invoices.

Our Approach

We built a suite of custom tools that automated nearly every step of the staffing and logistics pipeline.

Contracts & Payment. Automated contract generation for individual contractors and agency agreements, backed by a Supabase database. Purchase orders were generated and cross-referenced against staffing data—our audit system caught overpayments and underpayments automatically, flagging discrepancies down to the day-rate level.

Flights & Logistics. Booked and tracked international flights across multiple currencies, with booking confirmations, receipts, and itineraries stored per person. Budget reporting consolidated all cost categories into unified staffing reports.

Accreditation. Collected passport photos and headshots from all crew, then automated batch submission to the event's accreditation platform—each person's credentials submitted programmatically.

Competition Results. Built a results dashboard powered by a Python ETL pipeline that extracted structured data from ~3,500 result PDFs across four formats, served through a static Next.js dashboard with medal analysis and CSV export for the organizing committee.

Daily Reporting. Built a companion system for ceremony coordination and daily operational reporting during the Games themselves.

The Result

Every crew member contracted, flown in, accredited, and paid—across a dozen countries and multiple currencies. The financial audit system caught significant discrepancies before payments went out.

The competition results dashboard became the cross-validation reference between our team and the official Timing & Scoring department. And the daily reporting system kept ceremony logistics on track across 30 sports running simultaneously.

What made it work wasn't any single tool—it was building the right tool for each bottleneck and connecting them into a pipeline that could scale to over 100 people without adding headcount.

Tech Stack

SupabaseXero APIPython ETLNext.js 16TypeScriptPDF Extraction

Tags

100+ Personnel30 SportsMulti-currencyLive Event

Screenshots

Kronos Results Dashboard — 9,456 athletes across 32 sports
Medal analysis with physical medal counts and ceremony estimates
Live medal tracker — ceremony and medal counts across all venues
Staff instructions for the medal tracking reporting system

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