How Strava Brought Year in Sport In-House and Built It with Rive

Year in Sport is Strava's flagship annual campaign: a personalized experience for millions of athletes, recapping their year across 14 languages. For 2024, Strava brought it in-house for the first time and built the full experience in Rive.

Riley Yankowich and Khoi Phan have each published detailed case studies on the project. What follows draws from their work.

• Riley Yankowich (Creative Direction & Motion Lead) — theyanktank.com/yis →

• Khoi Phan (Executive Creative Director) — khoibphan.com →

Building it in-house

Year in Sport had previously been agency work. For 2024, Strava built it in-house for the first time.

In her case study, Riley describes integrating Rive into Strava's platform for the first time, "enabling interactive, data-driven animations with smaller file sizes and better performance." She worked closely with engineering to build the infrastructure and establish workflows between design and development.

Video courtesy of Riley Yankowich

Riley had also separately defined Strava's motion design system, building what she describes as a motion language that's "fluid, energetic, and grounded in natural movement."

The creative system

Image courtesy of Riley Yankowich

In Riley's words, the design language was "built on the subscription rebrand visual system I developed" and "emphasizes a premium feel for Strava's subscriber-only experience. The system flexes across product and marketing touchpoints, working globally while maintaining brand consistency."

Rive integration

Video courtesy of Riley Yankowich

Rive's State Machines and Data Binding made it possible to build personalized, data-driven animations that adapt to each athlete's year, across all 14 languages, in a single file. The video above shows how the Rive editor manages language switching through a state machine.

The product experience

Image courtesy of Riley Yankowich

As Riley describes it, "Year in Sport lives throughout the product, from contextual entry points when motivation is highest to the animated story experience. Each vignette adapts to the athlete's year, making millions of unique experiences feel crafted for one."

Video courtesy of Riley Yankowich

Image courtesy of Riley Yankowich

Design and personalization

Image courtesy of Khoi Phan

In his case study, Khoi Phan describes how the team set out to create "a deeply personalized lookback on 2024, built around insights only Strava could deliver." Flyover highlighted each user's most-loved route, and the team "wove together activity images, kudos, comments, and performance stats into a single, seamless story."

Every vignette adapted to region, age group, and performance benchmarks.

Image courtesy of Khoi Phan

The story experience

Video courtesy of Riley Yankowich

Results

From Riley's case study:

2024:

• 5.87M viewers

• 2.6M shares

• First in-house execution

2025:

• 3.2M viewers (subscribers only)

• 30,200 new subscriptions

• 110,000 trial starts

• Streamlined infrastructure for future campaigns

From Khoi's case study:

• ~86% view-through rate

• Paid media campaign delivered an 8% brand awareness boost with ~92% watch-through rate

Community and press response

Image courtesy of Khoi Phan

Image courtesy of Khoi Phan

The pattern

Strava's Year in Sport joins Spotify Wrapped and LinkedIn's Year in Review in a growing list of major personalized experiences built with Rive.

Read the full case studies

• Riley Yankowich — Motion system and Rive integration: theyanktank.com/yis →

• Riley Yankowich — Strava Motion System: theyanktank.com/strava-motion →

• Khoi Phan — Creative vision and full campaign: khoibphan.com →

Credits (via Khoi Phan):
Core team: Khoi Phan, Riley Yankowich, Eddie Carrillo, Meg Doshi, Sofia Morales, Emma Glazer, Lauren Pica, Joey Ianni, Sophie M, Jess Schiazza, Amy Jackson, Anton Schultz, Millie Ma, Georgie Griffiths, Katrina Lofaro, Matt Lucier, Riley Shore, Qui Nguyen, and the Strava engineering team.

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