20km de Bruxelles — The city's race, online
A trilingual site for the 20km of Brussels — one of Belgium's biggest mass-participation races — built to stay fast and online through the registration rush, with practical race info and results.
- Client
- 20km de Bruxelles
- Role
- Frontend & build
- When
- 2014
A trilingual site for the 20km of Brussels — one of Belgium's biggest mass-participation races — built to stay fast and online through the registration rush, with practical race info and results.
The 20km de Bruxelles / 20km door Brussel is one of Belgium's biggest mass-participation races — tens of thousands of runners looping through the heart of Brussels every May. We built the race its website.
The challenge
A race site is a seasonal spike machine, and its sharpest peak is registration — a huge, mixed audience converging at once to sign up. The site had to stay fast and stay up through that surge, without buckling at the exact moment everyone wanted in — all in three languages (French, Dutch, English), before flipping to results on race day.
What we built
Delivered at Cherry Pulp:
- A trilingual (FR/NL/EN) race site — the course, the rules, the route, and the event's history
- Online registration — the sign-up flow that turns interest into a race bib
- Practical information for participants: training, mobility, hotels, and accessibility (handisport)
- A results section and a race-day countdown
- Performance and resilience tuned for the registration peak — so the site stayed fast and online when sign-ups opened and traffic spiked
My role
I worked on the site's frontend and build at Cherry Pulp — the trilingual, participant-facing experience from registration through race-day results.
The interesting part
The defining constraint was the registration peak. When sign-ups open, traffic spikes hard and fast — and a slow or crashing site loses runners at exactly the wrong moment. The real work was performance: making the site fast and resilient enough to absorb that surge without falling over, while staying legible across three languages and an audience ranging from seasoned athletes to people running their first 20km.
Outcome
The 20km de Bruxelles got a trilingual home that carried runners from sign-up to finish line — registration, practical info, and results in one place.