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New Devices Help Track Olympic Winners
Darren writes "Athletes are going faster, higher and longer and as a result the technology that measures their feats at the Olympics needs to keep up. As a result a number of new devices to help track winners, losers at the Games have been developed, including microchips on marathon runners' shoes, ultrasensitive touch pads in the pool, radar guns at the beach volleyball and cameras that take 1000 images per second."
Putting RFID chips on your shoes is nothing new. All of the local races down here use ChampionChip timing, unless they're really small. Have done for years, too. There's a local company, Run-Far who times most of the races as well - you run over mats at the start, finish, and useful places in the middle. Works pretty well.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
from the article: Matsport relied on some rather amazing high-tech timing and scoring technologies this year, including a FinishLynx® high-speed digital finish line and timing camera system, produced by Lynx System Developers, Inc., of Haverhill, Massachusetts, and an AMB Activ transponder timing system, produced by AMB-it, Heemstede, Netherlands
There is also a really nifty diagram about halfway through the article, showing how the AMB Activ Transponder timing system works.
Not directly Olympics-related, but since we were on the topic of new technology used to measure athletes...
Actually other then the fact that the fencing equipment in the olympics is wireless, there isn't much new to the electronic sensors. Fencing was one of the first sports to benefit from electronics due to the extreme speed of the action (sabre fencing is the fastest martial art in the world).
Even with the sensors, an extremely skilled judge (called a director in fencing) is required to determine which competitor is considered the agressor and has 'right-of-way' to see who gets the point.
On a side note, as a long time fencer actually getting to watch the sport in the olympics for the first time I realised one thing. It is a really bad spectator sport if you do not know the sport yourself. I watched the events on tv with family and friends and unless they showed a slow motion replay, people were just at a loss as to what happened (unless they were fencers themselves).