Games tech is more than perfect timing
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA— When Ted-Jan Bloemen crossed the finish line in the pairing that would ultimately net him an Olympic silver medal, no one could actually see that he had won that 5,000-metre long-track race.
The difference between the Canadian and Norwegian speed skater beside him was far too close for that. It took advanced photo-finish technology, which captures 10,000 digital images per second, to determine that the tip of Bloemen’s skate blade crossed the finish line two onethousands of a second ahead.
The primary job of a timekeeper at the Olympics is to determine the results in events, some of which are now so close that there would be no way to fairly pick a podium without all the gear that arrived here in massive shipping containers.
But Omega, the Olympic timekeeper at the Winter Games since 1936, has moved well beyond timing and scoring events. Every bit of new technology at these 2018 Games is about enhancing the experience for television audiences with graphic displays and producing performance-based data for athletes, coaches and analysts.
“In every Games we release some new technology but, in this Games, the focus was on positioning and sensor devices to give the spectators different information,” Pascal Rossier, Omega’s head of sports operations, said outside the ski jumping hill. “It’s enhancing the TV spectator experience.”
The Olympic hockey players have motion sensors attached to the backs of their jerseys to capture live in-game data, which can, among other things, show how fast each player is moving, where they’ve been and their position on the ice relative to the other players.
In big air — the single-trick snowboarding event that makes its Olympic debut next week — motion sensors by the athletes’ feet will record their speed and height and distance. That data can be used, for example, to break down the triple corks that Canadians Mark McMorris and Max Parrot will thrown down in that event to help show why one might have received higher scores from judges than the other. Normally, to most people, what they’re doing is little more than an aweinspiring blur of flips and spins.
The new big air event is part of the International Olympic Committee’s attempts to draw a new and younger audience to the Olympics. That’s why it has opened the Olympics doors to new freestyle skiing and snowboarding events and shorter more dramatic versions of older sports like mass-start speed skating and mixed doubles curling. Skateboarding and surfing are on tap for the 2020 Summer Games.
“The big question is about how people are going to consume sport in the future and what is interesting to the new generation,” Rossier said.
That’s far from an idle curiosity for anyone at Omega, which has signed a contract to provide timing and other services at the Olympics until 2032. The hope is that translating athlete movements into graphic and visual displays will bring more understanding and interest to television audiences.
The sensors in bobsleds display the g-forces and the exact line of the run at various points along the track. The ones worn by ski jumpers can show their exact angle on the take off and the V of their skis.
“The data coming from this technology is not used for the official result,” Rossier said. “It’s more information that didn’t exist before.”
All this new technology and the hundreds of people needed to make it all work, creates more things to worry about at a Games for Rossier and his team. Will the batteries on the alpine skiers last a full run when it’s -32 C, as it was during a training day at the beginning of the Games? Do they have enough sensors for hockey, when some teams like Canada have three different sets of jerseys?
But the stakes aren’t as high as they are with Omega’s timing and scoring functions. If a motion sensor fails, that’s just some data that’s been lost; it doesn’t affect the outcome of an Olympic event.
The working philosophy behind the company’s timing and scoring systems is always the same: “Don’t stop the show.”
That’s why each venue is independently run with a backup system that can keep things going even if the power goes out for 30 minutes, Rossier said. “We can run the competition almost no matter what happens.”
Before Bloemen’s medal at these Games, Canada hadn’t won a medal in the 5,000-metre speed skating event since Willy Logan won bronze at the 1932 Lake Placid Games. Logan’s race was timed by a man holding a stopwatch.
This time, an official fired an electronic starting gun that automatically began timing the race and it didn’t stop until the skaters’ blades crossed the photocell-beam on the ice surface at the finish line.
It’s not all automated though. A person still had to look at the photofinish image and make the call that Bloemen had won the race.