SYDNEY — Olympics.com, the official Olympic Games Web site, set a world record for Web traffic Monday, recording 683 million hits.
This one-day tally surpassed the total traffic of 634 million hits received by the record-setting official site of the Nagano Olympic Games Web site during the entire 16 days of the Nagano Games in 1998.
IBM, which has to date produced and hosted record-breaking Web sites for major sports events like Wimbledon 2000 and the Olympic Winter Games in Nagano, anticipated more than 6 billion hits to Olympics.com during the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
With total hits in just the first six days of Olympic Games competition standing at 1.9 billion, the site is on track to make Olympics.com one of the most popular sports-event Web sites in the history of the Internet.
Also on Sunday, more than 15,000 visitors to the site took advantage of 8 IBM Real-Time Scoreboards to follow the live online action for baseball, basketball, beach volleyball, soccer, gymnastics, sailing, triathlon and volleyball.
The average time visitors spent using scoreboards was 20-30 minutes.
The three most popular athletes on Olympics.com were Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe , Judo competitor Ryoko Tamura of Japan and Canadian triathlete Simon Whitfield.
Swimming was the most popular sport on Sunday with most of the traffic coming from the United States (29.10 percent), Australia (12.92 percent) and Canada (4.91 percent).