How Olympic Timekeeping Works: Innovations Worth Watching

Omega has been timing Olympians for 90 years, but the future holds more than mere minutes and seconds.

For the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Omega sent one watchmaker from Switzerland with a suitcase filled with 30 chronographs—handheld stopwatches that were accurate to one-tenth of a second—to handle every event that required timing. In the more than 90 years since (Omega is still the official timekeeper of the Games) the undertaking has become something that requires hundreds of tons of technology, not to mention around 550 timekeepers, to measure results to the millionth of a second (with a deviation of 23 nanoseconds per 24 hours).

The first big innovation in automatic timing systems came ahead of the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, with the advent of technology that was relatively simple in retrospect: touchpads, which stop the clock when tapped by each competitor, giving them a precise finishing time rather than relying on humans armed with stopwatches. (Touchpads obviously aren’t an option in track. Competitors’ times in those events are determined by high-speed photos taken at the finish line.)

Omega has been the official Olympic timekeeper since 1932 :: Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

“It took about two decades for federations to accept that electronic timekeeping was more accurate than humans pushing on stopwatches,” says Alain Zobrist, the CEO of Swiss Timing who is in charge of Omega’s Olympic efforts.

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We take a lot in sports for granted, but the logistics, tech and teamwork behind our favorite games and events all are fascinating. Sports Illustrated's How It Works series goes behind the scenes to find out how it all comes together.

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The swimming touchpad quickly opened the floodgates for advancements in other sports. False-start detection systems built into the starting blocks for track events were a big step forward, starting in 1984. Then came seemingly minor changes, but ones with the potential to swing medal results. For instance, Omega developed an electronic starting pistol that flashes a light and connects to a speaker behind each racer, so as to eliminate the minuscule edge that racers with starting positions closer to the inside had due to their proximity to the gun.

Timeliness in producing results is also paramount. Zobrist says his goal is to be able to generate a time, produce a graphic and have it on screens within a tenth of a second. “It is extremely important to maintain the live aspect of an athlete’s performance,” he says. “If the delay is longer [than a tenth of a second], we will have a discrepancy between the image you see and the data that should match the system.”

Ensuring all systems operate flawlessly during a race brings about all sorts of safeguards fans might not consider. For instance, Omega runs all the power for its technology on sources separate from the rest of the power a venue uses, which is done to make sure the timing system still works even in the event of a blackout mid-race. Systems also have battery backups in case their own power source fails, and, according to Zobrist, in some sports, hand-timing is still done as a fourth or fifth backup option. Devices are tested at extreme temperatures—they function perfectly from -76° to 176°—and have to be able to maintain accuracy despite exposure to electromagnetic fields and electrostatics.

The introduction of touchpads in the ’60s revolutionized several sports :: Heinz Kluetmeier/Sports Illustrated

Plus, a piece of equipment isn’t used at the Olympics until it has been tried out in several other lower-stakes competitions to ensure it works to perfection. Its debut is often in a nontelevised local event, and, if all goes well, it progresses slowly up to national championships, continental events and World Cups. The process can take months or years.

But what’s next in electronic timekeeping could change how we consume events like the Olympics. Over the past 10 years, motion and positioning sensors have been a focus. Omega started by attaching the sensors to bobsleds and has been able to shrink the sensors down to the point that they can be attached to athletes in some sports. At the Tokyo Games, the company deployed them in ways that could show an athlete’s real-time speed in track and swimming, acceleration rates and even minutia like the number of strokes by each swimmer. The pose detection technology is also being used in other sports, like gymnastics, where it can assist judges in things like determining the synchronicity of competitors in pairs trampolining.

And Omega is only scratching the surface of what it can do with all the data it collects, especially with the ability to harness artificial intelligence to generate real-time insights. (Though the data isn’t necessarily used for judging purposes.) “We’re having artificial intelligence also [help] us understand the performance of athletes and eventually gained or lost time that was decisive for them winning or losing their race,” Zobrist says. “This is certainly the evolution we’re going to see now in the next couple of years, being able to compare performances through time a lot better in the future.” in order to be able to explain to audiences and fans how great these performances and athletes actually are.”