Last year's ODI Cricket World Cup, hosted in New Zealand and Australia, won the top accolade for Event Excellence on Monday night at the ninth New Zealand Sport and Recreation Awards in Wellington.
The success of the tournament can be seen in the numbers.
New Zealand hosted 23 out of the 49 tournament matches across seven cities, with 12 matches fully sold out, including both the quarter and semi-final.
The event, hailed as ‘the most popular in history’, attracted over 40,000 international visitors to New Zealand and saw 407,000 people attend a match. The tournament was one of the largest broadcast sports events in history, with a global reach of well over 1.5 billion.
An unprecedented 36 million unique visitors were attracted to the event website which accumulated over 300 million page views. This represents a 10-fold increase on any previous ICC event. The official tournament app was downloaded more than 4.5 million times and has been the number-one sports app in no fewer than 48 countries.
As a result of ICC Cricket World Cup 2015, there were significant increases in cricket and cricket player awareness. Six of the 10 most mentioned sportspeople in New Zealand in 2015 were BLACKCAPS players, made even more remarkable given 2015 was also a Rugby World Cup year.
The tournament also provided a legacy for the country’s young players. Over 1400 schools signed up to the new Cricket Smart schools programme as well as an increase in junior cricket registration.
