Comments

August 16, 2008 at 12:47 am

(1) Barry says:

What is the mechanism that tells the automatic timer which swimmer finished first?

It appears to be some kind of pad that the swimmers have to touch, but I can’t tell whether it is a pressure sensitive device or uses some other sensor to determine when a swimmer touches.

In particular, in light of the close finish of the 100 m men’s butterfly (0.01 seconds separating gold and silver, and the same time difference between the bronze medal winner and the 4th place swimmer) could it be triggered by a water pressure pulse?

August 16, 2008 at 1:42 am

(2) swimming guide says:

It is a “touch pad”, technology used for swimming races since the 60’s - refined a lot, but it is essentially a pressure sensitive pad. For the Beijing Olympics, Omega Timing is the official timer. The pad’s tolerances are supposed to require the touch of a swimmer to trigger it. I am confident that the system works. A pulse of water would have to come from a high=power nozzle to apply enough pressure to trigger the pad. A swimmer cannot push a narrow enough/strong enough stream of water to trigger the pad. In the case of the Phelps/Cavic finish, the timing officials also checked overhead high-speed cameras (like those used in track races) and confirmed that Phelps touched first.

Interestingly enough, there was a time when the touch-pad automatic timing system was over-ruled in the Olympics, resulting in a US swimmer being given the silver instead of the gold - the 1960 Olympics. A touchpad system resulted in the DQ of a US relay at the 2007 world championships.

August 20, 2008 at 8:57 pm

(3) Jeff Farrell says:

My recollection of the “timing machine” used in 1960 in Rome (invented by Max Ritter, president of FINA) is that it was a hand-turned wheel with paper spooling out. There were no touch pads in the pool; officials were assigned lanes and they pushed buttons (like stop watch buttons) when the swimmers were seen to touch the end of the pool. The machine punched holes in the paper when the buttons were pushed and this allowed judges to see which lanes finished first, second, etc.

In Rome these results and those of the place judges and the (stop watch) timers were all overruled and an official who wasn’t even at the end of the pool decided who he thought had won.

August 21, 2008 at 6:03 am

(4) swimming guide says:

Thank you for the correction, Jeff!