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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."
While I'm sure that nobody is tracking you right now, RFID tags can be read by several meters away and contain unique identifiers. If you thought the Pentium chip unique IDs were bad, this should (rightly so) worry you considerably more.
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).