The Engineering Behind an Olympic Moment

A race can be decided by a thousandth of a second. Behind that number is a century of engineering, and a story that began in Los Angeles in 1932.

By Alexzander Awni, Sports Technology and Next Generation Correspondent

Family First News Desk  |  Where Sports and Education Go Hand in Hand

Modern sports timing combines sensors, cameras, clocks and software to make close results trustworthy.

Electronic timing equipment positioned at a track finish line to record race results.

When an Olympic sprinter crosses the finish line, the result looks simple: a name and a time. The engineering behind it is anything but.

The story starts in Los Angeles. In 1932, one watchmaker from OMEGA traveled to the Olympic Games with 30 split-second chronographs, beginning a relationship between the Olympics and precision timekeeping that has lasted for 31 Games.

Since then, the measurements have gotten dramatically finer. Electronic systems allowed official times to be recorded to the hundredth of a second. By the 1992 Winter Games, a digital system measured times to the thousandth of a second. Today, the Scan’O’Vision ULTIMATE photo-finish camera can capture up to 40,000 images per second at the finish line, and OMEGA’s Quantum Timer has a resolution of one millionth of a second.

Those numbers have a physical meaning. A camera that takes 40,000 images per second records one image every 25 millionths of a second. A sprinter moving at 10 meters per second travels only a quarter of a millimeter between images. The system can see a difference far smaller than anything the human eye can detect.

Precision is an engineering problem, and it is solved by engineering.

The finish line is a system of sensors, cameras, clocks and software that all have to agree. Every part adds its own possible error. The designer’s job is to make each error small enough that the result is trustworthy, and to be able to explain how.

That is also why trust matters as much as speed. An athlete, a coach and a fan all have to believe the number. In a sport decided by thousandths of a second, measurement is part of the competition.

The Olympic Games return to Los Angeles in 2028, nearly a century after that first set of 30 chronographs arrived. The instruments will be far more advanced. The principle will be the same: get the measurement right, and let the athletes do the rest.

Disclosure: Family First Foundation publishes Family First News Desk and runs youth sports and education programs in Los Angeles. Alexzander Awni is an aerospace engineering student at Penn State and a STEM Ambassador for the Foundation.