When we watch a sporting event on television, such as the 100 meter dash in athletics, everything seems simple to us: the judge’s shot starts the race, the athletes run and at the finish line the final ranking appears superimposed with the times recorded by each participant. What we don’t see, however, is the technology that makes all this possible: sensors, lasers, photocells and super-computers that measure time with infallible precision and provide us with data and statistics in real time.
From the bicycle timekeeper who chased marathon runners in the early 1900s to today’s artificial intelligence, the measurement of time in the world of sport, through sensational errors, ingenious inventions and controversies, has undergone an extraordinary evolution towards the search for perfection, which today allows us to understand in a more in-depth way the greatness of the most incredible sporting performances.
The first methods of measuring time in sports: manual stopwatches
The evolution of sports timekeeping begins a long time ago, when it became necessary not only to determine the winner of a race, but also to know the time taken by an athlete to cover a certain distance. From the first modern Olympics in the late 19th century until the 1930s, timekeepers used manual mechanical watches to record times, reacting to start and finish signals with their own human reflexes to start and stop the stopwatch. Considering that the human reaction time is 1-2 tenths of a second, a blink of an eye or a slight distraction from the timekeeper was enough to have macroscopic differences in the final time assigned to the athletes.
Furthermore, the accuracy of the stopwatch was limited to a fifth of a second, so in a 100-meter race two athletes credited with the same finish time could have been about 2 meters apart from each other. To reduce these errors, up to three timekeepers were used for each athlete, taking the recorded intermediate time as official. But even so, the human element remained the system’s Achilles’ heel.
The photo finish revolution
The 1932 Los Angeles Olympics represented a first significant revolution in the world of sports timing thanks to the introduction of the “Photo-electric Camera”, a “two-eyed camera” capable of recording up to 128 images per second. In that edition, US athletes Eddie Tolan and Ralph Metcalfe crossed the finish line of the Olympic 100 meters at the same time, but for the first time in history the decision on awarding the victory was not made by human judges: photographic analysis determined that Tolan’s back was slightly ahead of Metcalfe’s.
At the same time, the “broken wire” method was introduced to measure times without the aid of manual chronometers. With this method the athlete, simply by running, “broke” a thread during the start and finish phases. This wire dropped a weight that opened (at the start) and closed (at the finish) an electrical circuit that activated and stopped a chronometer. Thanks to these two technologies, for the first time the judges no longer had a way to influence, with their reflexes, the times recorded by the athletes, and the concept of photo finish that we know today came into play.
Precise photocells and displacement sensors in sports
As the years went by, electronically measured times were incorporated into all types of competitions. Some disciplines began to decide their winners based on thousandths of a second, and photocells became the standard in sports timing.
However, increasingly precise technologies began to reserve surprises and paradoxes. In 1972, at the Munich Olympics, a situation occurred in the 400 m medley swimming event that threw the system into crisis: the Swede Gunnar Larsson and the American Tim McKee reached the finish line with the same time to the hundredth, 4’31″98, but the measurement awarded the victory to Larsson by just two thousandths. The judges awarded the gold to the Swede, but the decision sparked a debate: two thousandths of a second corresponded to less than 4 millimeters traveled by the athlete at the average swimming speed, a distance lower than the construction tolerance of the Olympic pools. The world swimming federation therefore decided that, from that moment on, in the case of times identical to one hundredth of a second, the victory would be awarded ex aequo, but Tim McKee remained forever with his Olympic silver at neck.
The evolution towards digital technology has been increasingly rapid, up to the adoption of systems capable of recording times down to a millionth of a second. Electronic starting guns have been introduced to eliminate any advantage due to the speed of sound in the air, false starts are detected by pressure sensors installed on the starting blocks, and the role of the judges has become less and less decisive in awarding victories and decreeing defeats.
Artificial intelligence, RFID chips and GPS sensors: between algorithms and absolute precision
The last phase, the current one, is that of integral digitalisation and artificial intelligence, which is still in full evolution. Modern systems no longer simply measure time: they analyze, process and transmit enormous amounts of data in real time. What were once simple stopwatches are now computers capable of managing thousands of athletes and millions of data simultaneously, using RFID chips, transponders and GPS sensors to track every movement with millimeter precision and analyzing data such as speed, acceleration, position, reaction time, heart rate. This enormous amount of data is processed in real time by algorithms that can predict performances, optimize race strategies and even prevent injuries.
Technological evolution has radically transformed the very concept of sporting competition. If a century ago it was enough to “arrive first”, today every fraction of a second is measured, analyzed and compared. Athletes no longer only compete against each other, but also against increasingly higher standards of precision. Timekeeping has become a scientific discipline in its own right, where human error has been replaced by the absolute and unquestionable precision of computers.
