Race timing and the “chip wars”
Last fall, I wrote a piece for New England Runner about the changing face of transponder (aka “chip”) timing, where long-dominant ChampionChip was seeing a new wave of competition from lighter, cheaper, and sometimes “disposable” new technology.
Even since publication, however, the chip world has moved on from the state of last fall. I’m told that ChampionChip is nearly out of the picture (you’ll still see them around, as timing companies which own ChampionChip equipment will keep using it) and the disposable chips are dominating. I haven’t heard if the waste issues raised by the disposables have been addressed, nor do I know if the “holy grail” of chip timing, a transponder which can be embedded in the bib number and worn without any extra work from the runner, is any closer.
With that said, here’s where things stood last September. This is as I submitted it, not as it eventually ran, so there may be errors and issues; bear in mind that “this year” means 2008. Hyperlinks, rather than coming up in the text, are all provided at the end of the story.
BEEEEEEP – a Field Guide to Transponder Timing in New England
If you move an otherwise un-powered wire through a magnetic field, you create a current in that wire. That’s middle school physical science, but bear with me: it’s the idea that gave you an accurate finish time at your last big race. A tiny, coiled circuit in a plastic case moves through the electrical field generated by an antenna. The current activates the circuit and produces a unique radio-frequency “chirp.” The antenna picks up the chirp, and knows that particular chip is nearby. Beeeeep.
It might be middle school physical science, but for the last dozen years it’s been a significant part of the running industry. The same Texas Instruments transponders used to charge gas at the pump (in the Mobil Speedpass) were also put to work timing Dutch road races in 1994 with the Champion Chip timing system. After several smaller trials, “the Chip” had a high-profile U.S. debut at the 100th B.A.A. Boston Marathon.
ChampionChip was the face of transponder timing after 1996, but in recent years the distinctively-cased ChampionChips, which runners attach to their shoelaces, have been joined by cylinders worn on ankle straps (the Winning Time system), cards slightly smaller than credit cards, also attached to shoes (Ipico, pronounced eye-pee-co), and disposable RFID tags distributed on runners’ numbers and then tied to their shoes (ChronoTrack’s D-Tag).
Chip timing systems are like textbooks, because the people who decide which ones to use, the race directors and timing companies, aren’t always the ones ultimately using and paying for them. We tried to sort out the different systems for you.
Starting off big
As the first American race director to put chips on the shoes of thousands of runners, Dave McGillivray has a unique perspective on jumping in with a new technology. McGillivray, then the technical director of the Boston Marathon, had been hunting for a better way to handle timing and scoring of a field which had peaked at 9,629 in 1992. In 1994, he found a ChampionChip booth at the expo of the New York City Marathon. ChampionChip, developed by the team which timed the fabled Seven Hills Run (Zevenheuvelenloop) in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, had recently had its big-city debut at the 1994 Berlin Marathon.
“I asked if they were using the chip in New York, and they weren’t; they said they were there looking for someone like me,” he recalls. “I asked them if they would drive their gear up to Boston the day after the NYCM.” McGillivray’s team was impressed by the early-November demo, but in 1995 the B.A.A. decided it was “too risky” to put the new and relatively untested technology on in 1996.
McGillivray continued testing the ChampionChip, using it for some runners at the 1995 New Bedford Half Marathon and several other races. Then, in January 1996, he reports, “everything changed.”
“We realized that we would have more runners qualified and entering than we had expected,” McGillivray explains. “We realized that we didn’t have a choice any longer; we had to adjust.” McGillivray called ChampionChip and asked them if they could be ready to time the 100th Boston three months later–and if they could come up with 40,000 chips for the largest marathon field ever assembled.
After the 100th Boston, ChampionChip’s PR was “explosive,” said McGillivray. Within five years, every major marathon in the world was using the ChampionChip.
Chip proliferation
Within a few years of ChampionChip’s success, the Winning Time system arrived, and today is used in New England by Bay State Race Services. Winning Time uses a slightly smaller plastic-cased transponder than ChampionChip, and generally asks runners to attach the chip using a strap on their ankle rather than lacing it to their shoes. Dave Camire’s Yankee Timing company uses DAG chips, a “second-generation RFID” system; IPICO’s “tags” have not made it to New England yet, but Bob Teschek of Granite State Racing Services expects they will soon. “The tags aren’t as durable, but the cost is lower so they pay for themselves sooner,” he observes.
McGillivray’s DMSE company doesn’t own ChampionChip equipment; they subcontract to experienced timing companies like Granite State Racing Services. Granite State’s Teschek is in his 24th year of race timing, and he’s seen all the advantages and disadvantages of transponder timing. Having used ChampionChip since 1999, Teschek recently added ChronoTrack, a disposable chip system, to his toolbox.
“It costs a race about $1 to rent each ChampionChip,” says Teschek, “but the handling is a pain.”
“We have to find fewer finish-line volunteers,” agrees McGillivray, “but we take on stuffing chip envelopes, matching chips to bibs, collecting chips at the finish and paying for missing ones, and educating runners about how to use the chips.”
ChronoTrack tags generally cost less than $2 each (the cost varies for races of different sizes) but resolve most of the handling problems. The tag is already attached to the runner’s number, and doesn’t need to be collected after the race. “The runner still has to remove the tag and tie it to their shoes,” says Teschek, “But at least if they screw up and leave it behind somewhere, they’re not out $30,” the usual ChampionChip replacement fee. After Falmouth, both the Tufts Health Plan 10K and the Manchester Road Race are using ChronoTrack this year.
Teschek predicts that the next big thing will be a disposable tag-type system like ChronoTrack which will be attached to the bib number, requiring no more action from the runner than pinning on their bibs. “I shouldn’t mention that, because all the runners will want it and it’s not here yet,” he adds. In addition to the ease of use, that sort of system would address a longtime criticism of chip timing, which was that USATF and IAAF rules require races to be decided by when a runner’s torso crosses the line, not their feet. (The IAAF began allowing transponder timing for road events in 2007.)
(The race directors’ overhead is reduced slightly by runners who own their own ChampionChips, but Teschek estimates only two to three percent of runners own chips. The advantage of owning a chip is not immediately obvious; Marc Chalufour of the B.A.A. speculated that the biggest advantage was “not having to untie your shoes at the end of a race.”)
Doing it by hand
Not everyone is a chip-timing convert, however. Colorado-based timer Benji Durden still works with chutes, tear tags, and his own software system. “Even with the most sophisticated chip timing system, you still have to understand how to time a race,” Durden told John Swenson for an article published in Northwest Runner earlier this year. “If you can’t score a small race with Popsicle sticks and a stopwatch, you can’t score it with chips. You have to understand the basic things that happen in a race.”
Teschek agrees with Durden’s sentiment, if not his decision. “You have to understand the basics,” he says. “Some people expect the chip to do all the work for them, but it’s a lot more work than that. No matter what tool you’re using, you’re a lot better after four or five years than you were when you started.”
Like other systems, transponder timing can also break down under extreme conditions. Teschek noted that while ChronoTrack is supposedly accurate enough to catch all runners with one finish line mat, the manufacturers still recommend two “in case someone runs over your equipment with a car.” The 2007 Honolulu Marathon saw a spectacular chip failure, where a predecessor of the ChronoTrack system missed about 3,000 runners at the start and about 2,400 at the finish. The problem, according to Dave Simms of SAI Timing, which made the system, was not the chips, but the tropical downpour which caused five of his eight power generators to fail.
Most transponder timing systems so far have also required the transponder to be worn on or near a runner’s shoe, due to technology limitations which prevent the antennas, embedded in mats laid across the race course, from reading chips more than a few feet away. (The Winning Time system, for example, claims a “read height” of six feet, “which no other company in the industry can offer,” but instructions for their chip still recommend shoe or ankle attachment.) A runner who carries a chip in the key pocket of their shorts won’t be picked up at every mat (if at any) and probably won’t appear in the race results, leading to nearly every race packet containing a chip to also include the all-caps warning, “NO CHIP, NO TIME!”
“You can’t make the runners go back and run it again if you miss them,” jokes Teschek. “They don’t usually take well to that suggestion.”
Payback in services
The advantages of the extra work, Marc Chalufour of the B.A.A. explains, are that “we can deliver the same services to 25,000 paying customers as to the elite athletes.” That includes 5km splits, a net time, and online athlete tracking. All five of the Marathon Majors use ChampionChip, and though there is no formal agreement between ChampionChip and the Majors, “it’s been time-tested, and it’s weathered the storm. Making the leap to another technology would be a little scary.”
Chalufour pointed out that at the 2008 USA Olympic Team Trials – Women’s Marathon, the Boston course lined up such that mile marks were at the same spot for each loop of the course – miles 3, 9 and 15 were all at the same spot. “With a chip mat at each of six checkpoints, plus the start and finish, from three miles on we got every mile split for every runner.” Chalufour expects to see a major marathon providing mile splits for the entire field within a few years. Online athlete tracking is an expectation now.
None of these were conceivable before 1994, he adds. “New things are going to be possible that aren’t even on our minds now. The Tour de France is tracking riders with GPS. That’s not practical yet for running, because lightness is a priority, but we’re moving in the direction of more and more precise data.”
“It’s never going to stay still,” says McGillivray.
Which chip?
With at least four transponder timing technologies in use in New England, what’s the difference?
Superficially similar chip systems are often compared on accuracy–that is, how often the system misses chips. The size of a race makes a difference; a system which catches every runner if they’re coming every other second might start missing them if five, ten, or a dozen pass each second. Redundant systems (usually multiple antennas) provide additional data to fill in the gaps, but no system (including, McGillivray observes, manual timing) is perfect. However, most timing companies will use two mats at the start and finish, reducing the chances of a system missing any particular chip to nearly nothing.
Experience makes a difference, too. Teschek says every system has a learning curve, and he’s making sure his teams are watched by ChronoTrack technicians in their first big races with the new system. “I wouldn’t want to be doing a lot of big races on our own until we’ve more confident,” he says, but demand for ChronoTrack has been such that he expects that confidence to arrive quickly.
The biggest change in transponder timing promises to be “disposable” chips like ChronoTrack; ChampionChip is working on their own disposable system, indicating the direction the industry is moving. Disposable chips’ advantages are in efficiency, particularly in administrative overhead for race directors, but the idea of throwing away 25,000 chips after a race the size of the Boston Marathon is sobering. “We could easily make a disposable chip, but our chips last for 30, 40 years. You never have to throw them away,” Julia Vitarello, general manager of Winning Time Americas, told Northwest Runner. “Can you imagine every year throwing away 50,000 chips after Bloomsday? Imagine all the races across the U.S. We try to make it easy for the athlete and race director, without creating a landfill full of chips.”
“Simple, efficient, accurate, and affordable,” is how McGillivray describes his dream system. “The system that alleviates the administrative work is what all the race directors are looking for.” The disposable chip looks promising in that direction, but the recent trend towards reduction of races’ waste stream might slow adoption of a transponder designed for one-time use.
A race’s size may also dictate how much choice they have. A hypothetical race of about 1,500 runners (a very large event in some communities) may be limited to the system used by whatever timing company is available for their race date. Races of “only” a few hundred runners may find that Durden’s Popsicle-stick method is still the height of technology, although Teschek says races of 200-300 are contacting him about chip timing.
http://www.championchip.com/home/
http://www.ipicosports.com/
http://www.chronotrack.com/
http://www.winningtimeamericas.com/
April 28th, 2010 at 12:36 pm
[...] you’re curious about transponder-based timing technology, I wrote an article for New England Runner in late 2008 which, while already obsolete in terms of the current state of [...]