BMX Worlds

Interesting observation of 5 Swatch timer crew vs 3 french cup timers.
Except for the elite and juniour "medal" championships the Worlds were timed by 3 people using a single side Lynx and a HD cameral face on at 45 degrees. Most finish orders were manual. Some were photofinish which is where they did something new to me,

I think they were using a scan start trigger because I am not sure how he recorded finishes. I did not see him press a key or trigger button. the other thing that was interesting to me was the use of a small flip board where a volunteer scanned it past the view of the finish lynx camera to show the moto number for indexing. This saved the operator the need to save to new files for each moto but i am not sure he had a backup.

The Swatch team brought lots of gear. 6 or 6 computers, a Chip timing system and 2 Omega cameras as well as photocells, They could barely manage 1 race at a time without making us wait for the next heat. They did manage for the most part to run 2 races but we waited for them more than for the other team who ran a lot more races and racers. They had file management issues i am sure as they were manually assigning new file numbers each moto. They also used an Official to trigger the cameras for each rider. The software they used for the transponders would announce a photo finish for any 2 riders the finished within a preset time to prevent any Transponder overlap. I think thes used 50 thousands of a second as the delay. The program should have been able to output moto transfers but the BMX rulebook is changing ever week. There was at least 1 transponder mixup and at least 1 case where the rider rode a different bike in a final.
The swatch guys were supplying the TV graphics and they looked ok. They definitely have all the gear but they need some smoother procedures. and the file system needs faster save capabilities.