Modern Pentathlon beams out to a whole new world from Berlin

The 2015 UIPM Senior Modern Pentathlon World Championships in Berlin showcased the sport to new audiences across the globe.

As the Women's Individual gold was won on Saturday by Lena Schoneborn of Germany, 1.3 million viewers in the host nation tuned in to the live TV coverage on the ARD network. With a 9.8% audience share among viewers aged over 3, this was a bigger audience than that which tuned in to Tour de France and football transmissions on the same channel on the same day.

In total, two hours of live Modern Pentathlon were broadcast by ARD, together with 12 hours of live streaming on UIPM's YouTube channel where there were more than 150,000 minutes of recorded viewing. The countries with the greatest pick-up were Lithuania, Ukraine, Hungary, Russia and Italy.

On Sunday, during the Mix Relay Final won by the Czech Republic (Natalie Dianova & Jan Kuf), 1.18 million viewers in Germany tuned in to the live TV coverage on ARD.

The 55th UIPM Senior World Championships - which offered three men's and three women's individual qualifying places for the 2016 Rio Olympics - also created a big stir on social media where UIPM's regular updates attracted700,000 impressions on Facebook and Twitter.

Shiny Fang, Secretary General of UIPM, said: "The unprecedented level of media interest in the 2015 Senior World Championships illustrates how fast our sport is growing, as does the increasing number of people all around the world who are becoming involved with Modern Pentathlon online.

"These figures not only confirm what we already knew - that people all around the world have a keen interest in our sport - but that the audience has enormous potential for growth."

Lena Schoneborn's success was one of two gold medals for the host nation Germany, who also won the Men's Relay (Alexander Nobis & Marvin Faly Dogue).

China (Liang Wanxia & Chen Qian) won the Women's Relay and the Mix Relay was claimed by Czech Republic (Natalie Dianova & Jan Kuf).

Pavel Tymoshchenko (Ukraine) beat 2014 champion Aleksander Lesun (Russia) to the top of the Men's Individual podium.

Follow all the action of Modern Pentathlon at www.pentathlon.org, our updates through Facebook at www.facebook.com/modpen and Twitter at https://twitter.com/UIPM_HQ