At 10:22 PM +0100 30.12.2001, James Dunaway wrote: >To the list: > > >The timing was done by Winning Time, an Italian company >which has an American branch in Colorado. > >This is the technology which was used for all the road races >at the recent World Track and Field Championships in Edmonton. > > >Actually, I believe they're a lot closer than "within a second," probably >within 0.1 second in most cases. > >One of the advantages of Winning Time's technology is that it is >able to read and distinguish between several runners crossing the split mat >at almost the same time. This is especially important, of course, in longer >road races, where it's important to know if each finisher actually covered >the entire course. I'm not sure about other companies' ability to >do this as well as Winning Time does. > ==========================
This may be a frightening prospect if the same technology as used at Edmonton is receiving credit for accurately producing a proper order, either at the finish or at interval checkpoints. Kevin Saylors and I had the job of spotting/charting both the men's and women's Edmonton marathons for the PA. We've consulted with each other, and this is what we can report. Kevin and I had the live video feed and CBC TV on-course spotters' audio, as well as the on air audio. What we discovered was that the system seems to give accurate times to the full second, but if there are more than one person with the same time, there is no guarantee that the athletes show up in proper sequence. Sequence errors within a pack were more common than not. Remember that athletes are covering some 6m per second, so it's not difficult to identify proper sequence with the monitors. We were never certain what was determining the sequence, in part because we learned almost immediately to ignore the EPSON display on our data monitors for the sequencing. The runners were identified by place as the left column listed the place numeral, so it's not as if they were trying to convey only the time and not the place. (The information system used in Edmonton was EPSON. It was this system which delivered the incorrect order within packs. But whether this system took the sequencing directly from Winning Time we don't know. It is possible that EPSON had to truncate the Winning Time times to full seconds and then sequenced the same-time runners into whichever screwy order was appearing on EPSON. Therefore, what we saw on the EPSON monitor, and what was displayed to the stadium audience until we could order a manual override of the scoreboard, was the raw EPSON data, which may or may not be an accurate reflection of the data in the Winning Time system.) We do know the determining factor for the order was not the true sequence, and Kevin thinks it may have been an alphibetization of the last names. It may also have been alpha by country. I don't think it was by bib number, as I remember that being one of the possibilities that we eliminated pretty quickly. What also might have occurred is that the intermediate chip times were somehow recording in sequence as true elapsed time which was started when the runners crossed the starting line. But I doubt this because even though only about one-fourth of the field started in the first row there was no transponder mat at the start area. And finish times were taken by eye-beam to the full second. As I said, Kevin and I never did ascertain what the sequencing system was. And the computer techs in the operations area didn't know either. But whatever it was, it sure wasn't the order in which the runners crossed the timing mats. Dave Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
