Track races, in contrast with foot races on asphalt, require a higher level of precision and, as they are very fast races, two athletes can reach the finish line at almost the same time. In spite of the precision that had been achieved by this time in sports race timing, it was not without its controversy. Heuer’s hegemony over race timing at the Olympic Games ended in 1928, when Longines manufactured a pocket stopwatch that could measure with a precision of 1/100 of a second. It was Heuer in 1916 that patented a chronometer with an accuracy of 1/50 of a second, and as a result this company was commissioned to time Olympic Games events from 1920 to 1928. The first electronic timekeeping models that counted hundredths of a second appeared in 1902. Races would not be timed with resolutions as high as ⅕ of a second until 1862.įor many years, official race times were recorded in fifths of a second in spite of the fact that the technology existed to time athletics events counting tenths of a second. Human races first began to be timed at Oxford University in 1850, taking times with a resolution of a ½ second, using the chronometer model invented by Abraham-Louis Breguet. The first timed races were not athletics events, but horse races in England in 1731. Who were the first to begin timing races? Since Spyridon Louis won the first marathon in the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1.896, sports timing technology for races has developed at an unstoppable rate, especially in the last few years. It was rare for two athletes to reach the finishing line of a marathon at the same time, and for this reason race timing and timing in athletics events have quite different needs and requirements. In 1721, when George Graham added a third needle to clocks so that they could count the seconds, this was sufficient for timing marathons but for athletics events involving shorter distances, seconds were not enough for race timing. And technologically there was no way to race timing anyway. In those first Olympic Games, all that mattered was who won. It’s strange that the Greeks themselves didn’t call on Chronos, god of time, to measure the times for their races. Is race timing as old as the very first races? Hi! In this post we want to offer you a brief overview of the history of race timing.
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