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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."
Its always been easy to track the winners at the Olympics.
They're the ones with the medals hanging around their necks.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
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!
> ultrasensitive touch pads in the pool
I used to know a girl who had a couple of those.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
No Fair! They will be changing the outcome when they measure the outcome.
I was at the pub watching the men's sabre competition and we noticed they were wearing helmets the light up in different colors, also wear clothing that detects contact and prevents the usual bloodletting a strike would make. Pretty interesting stuff.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Now we just need a way to stop the judges from doing something stupid in gymnastics and we'll be set.
Something tells me that the technology used will inevitably be faster than the athletes it's used to track. Athletes are, after all, not going twice as high, twice as long or twice as fast, every two years.
...that's about how many are taken of Misty May's and Kerri Walsh's butts as they play a game.
I can only assume that most of the finishes will be recorded digitally, along with all of the information collected about speed and time and all of that.
So where will all of the information go when the games are over? Is there going to be a huge online stockpile where we can all go and watch the ultra slow motion finishes, and look up who had the fastest volleyball spike? I know I could spend hours just watching the slow motion cameras they use to record the divers and sprinters.
Anyone else interested? Can you imagine how much data they must be generating with all of these cameras and sensors?
Apparently the athletes are improved, too. In track events, a start time within 0.1 seconds of the gun going off is considered a false start. Apparently 0.1 seconds is the fastest reaction time that humans are capable of. Some athletes, though, are now able to react in under 0.1 seconds, and as a result, they are being charged with false starts.
a combination of well calibrated sensitivity and wet-road-tire-like grooves prevents the water from activating them.
it's just they're anticipating the gun, sometimes they get it right and most of the time they get it wrong: given the new rule that any false starter (after the first start) will be DQ'd I'm sure you won't see 0.1sec reaction times the second time around: to the naked eye the reaction times of the 2nd start they did the other day in the 100m semi-final seemed slower than the 1st for example.
It'd also be interesting to know how far from the athletes the gun is located and if sound travel speed can have an impact on things (how is the electronic system synchronized to the gun? via sound? some other way?)
-- the cake is a lie
That must be a typical media oversimplification, right? If a race comes down to a scary, rubbing-elbows-with-the-guy-beside-me sprint, I sure don't want the 'win' to be decided by where in its rotation my wheel is when we cross the line together...
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...
. . .is there a device to track Olympic Weiners?
See above post about RFID tags in condoms.
KFG
The coolest tech out there is definitely finishlynx. It takes pictures of who crosses the finish line only a pixel or two wide and stitches them together so you know exactly who crossed the line in what order and what their times were since the times are exactly proportional with the pics. In this pic of me in the men's lightweight single dash I am finishing 3rd (Alex Krupp, lane 1). The reason I appear so bloated compared to everyone else is I put on a huge fucking sprint at the finish and even though I was a full boat length of open water down on 5th place with 100 meters left I managed to finish 3rd. Not bad for not eating shit or drinking much in 2 days to make weight. Anyway because I was going so much faster than everyone else at the finish I appear in the least number of pixel wide images, thus making me appear bloated and compressed compared to all the other boats. The reason all the oars are swirly is because they change positions from when the first part of the oar crosses the line to when the whole boat is passed, thus creating a cool real time motion blur.