About This Project

The City to Surf

The Sun-Herald City2Surf is a 14-kilometre running event held annually in Sydney, Australia. Starting at Hyde Park in the CBD and finishing at Bondi Beach, it is one of the world's largest fun runs, regularly attracting over 80,000 participants in modern years.

The race was first held in 1971 and has been an iconic part of Sydney's sporting culture ever since. The challenging course includes the infamous "Heartbreak Hill" through Rose Bay.

How We Built This

The historical results on this site were digitised from original newspaper clippings using a combination of Google Cloud Vision API and Tesseract OCR. The scanned pages were processed at 350 DPI, split into column strips, and run through multiple OCR engines to maximise accuracy.

Results from both OCR engines were then merged using a name-quality scoring algorithm that selected the best reading for each finisher. While we've done our best to ensure accuracy, some names may contain OCR artefacts from the original newspaper scans.

Contribute Data

Corrections and additional years of data are welcome. If you have results from years not yet in the archive, get in touch via the contact page.