At The Paris 2024 Olympics, Timekeeping Under The Gun

PARIS — It will be the time master at the upcoming Paris 2024 Olympic Games. A precious ally of referees, sports timing will be used in all disciplines to evaluate athletes’ performances as precisely as possible. From relay races and beach volleyball to diving and swimming, these measures will have to be highly accurate, indisputable, to make up for any human error.

To ensure this, the Swiss watchmaker and official timekeeper Omega will set the tempo through the Olympic and Paralympic festivities. Since 1932 and the Los Angeles Olympics, the Swiss brand has supplied the organizers with 30 split-second chronographs, which have a second hand that can be stopped to measure intermediate times.

This summer, a team of some 550 timekeepers and technicians will travel across France with more than 350 tons of equipment. New cutting-edge technology, artificial intelligence, ultra-high-performance sensors: the history of sports timekeeping, first mechanical, then electrical, and finally electronic, is evolving at breakneck speed.

In search of accuracy

This fascinating know-how has always accompanied the development of major competitions and, above all, their professionalization. It wasn’t until the 18th century that this small mechanical revolution arrived in England, with horse racing — and the betting that went with it. The British watchmaker George Graham had already developed an astronomical clock in 1721, displaying seconds and minutes in two separate counters.

A century later, in 1821, a new instrument astonished high society (again in horse races) but this time in Paris. Developed by French King Louis XVIII’s watchmaker, Nicolas Matthieu Rieussec, the system was ingenious because it was highly visual.

Each time a jockey crosses the finish line, a push button on the instrument is activated to deposit a drop of ink on a rotating white enamel dial. All that’s left to do is to read the time information corresponding to the deposit. Thus was born the first chronograph and, with it, the end of betting disputes.

Unfortunately, the accuracy of timing is often called into question by competitors. Human error, the dexterity of the referees, or the impartiality of the judges can be the subject of heated debate. In 1896 in Athens, at the first modern Olympic Games, the first mechanical chronographs were introduced. But they were called into question during a 100-meter race between the American Tomas Burke — one of the first to use the crouching start — and the German Fritz Hoffmann.

Limiting human error

The reason? The accuracy of the measurements taken to 1/5th of a second did not allow for an indisputable tie-break. Indeed, in manual timekeeping, not only can measurements vary from one chronograph to another — referees at the time came with their own chronographs — but the results can also be distorted by human measurement, given that the eye is incapable of determining a movement below 1/5th of a second.

Added to this is the time lag at the start, between the pistol shot and the manual start of the stopwatch, and the referee’s reaction time at the finish to stop the time.

To limit this variable, official Olympic timekeepers (Omega, Longines, Swatch, Heuer, Junghans, Lip, etc.) have over time developed instruments designed to limit human intervention. The first quartz instruments, which didn’t even look like a watch at the time, were manufactured to meet the needs of timekeeping, enabling measurements of unvarying quality and diabolical precision.

If “the important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part,” then victory must be fair.

For if “the important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part” — in the words of Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics — then victory must be fair.

In 1972, at the Munich Olympic Games, Longines set the tone as the official timekeeper for 11 sports including cycling, swimming, gymnastics and judo. Some 30 timekeepers were made available by the Swiss brand, which offered skills quite different from those of a traditional watchmaker: radio electricians, electronics engineers, and precision mechanics were all on hand.

Longines invested 2 million Swiss francs, a colossal sum for the time. Machines replaced people, measurements become mechanical, and time was stopped by a wire stretched across the finish line — marvels of inventiveness that later improved upon with the arrival of photoelectric cell triggers, followed by lasers.

40,000 images per second

At this year’s Summer Olympics, Omega also plans to revolutionize the measurement of time and the analysis of athletes’ performances with the launch of a new cutting-edge technology: the Scan’O’Vision Ultimate, which is able to capture some 40,000 digital images per second at the precise moment of crossing the finish line.

By comparison, the brand’s Scan’O’Vision Myria, first used at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016, recorded 10,000 images per second. A significant advance, equipped with ultra-high-performance sensors capable of producing images of unprecedented clarity. Eliminating any pixel interference that could be detrimental to reading the result of an event, it should avoid any possible problems in the event of an almost absolute tie.

Whether in athletics or track cycling, every runner crossing the finish line will be represented in a composite photo that will serve as the basis for official results.

Tour de France fans may remember the incredible finish photo taken by Tissot Timing during stage 7 of the 2017 tour, where only a few millimeters of a tire separated the winner at the finish. The victory was impossible to see with the naked eye; the gap between the two riders was 0.0003 seconds, i.e. less than a thousandth of a second.

AI to the rescue

High-definition filming will also be combined with artificial intelligence this year. The analysis of athletes’ gestures during the race will be enhanced by computer vision technology, a first.

Thanks to a network of high-definition cameras, connected to an analysis system driven by artificial intelligence specifically programmed and “trained” for each sport, this technology will offer dynamic performance data, without requiring the installation of physical sensors on the athletes.

This method will provide a complete perspective of competitions, and goes so far as to anticipate the technical gestures to be performed — such as passing the baton in relay races or pole vaulting — which is a major asset for coaches. In the case of pole vaulting, it will now be possible to know in real time the margin left for the jumper to pass over the bar after a successful jump.

Producing a fairer, more neutral result, that is the objective of timekeeping.

Sports such as beach volleyball will benefit from high-definition camera systems that track every movement of the ball and players without intrusive sensors. We will be able to obtain the height of each athlete’s jumps, the speed at which they move, and even the power of their smashes. This is a far cry from the ancient Olympic Games, where all that counted was the impartiality of the start of a race — whether on foot or with chariots— and the visual judgment of the referees at the finish line.

In diving, a combination of artificial intelligence and mathematical algorithms will provide a 3D view of the event. This is an invaluable aid for the judges, who will be able to see and review the technical aspects linked to the starting position, execution during the flight, rotation speed, and angle of entry into the water.

In gymnastics, too, where the human decision comes into play is, by definition, fallible. Thanks to 3D images, errors of judgment in scoring the execution of a movement or figure are greatly reduced.

Reinventing the way in which sporting performances are measured and analyzed to produce a fairer, more neutral result, that is the objective of timekeeping, which echoes the very spirit of the Olympic ideal: fair play, excellence and, of course, integrity in sport. The important thing is to time (well).