A picture speaks a thousand words.
At the Lake Louise World Cup, we used a little trick I learned at a PGA Tour golf event to extend our intranet almost 4000 meters, through the hill wiring, to the race _START_ (hint: the trick does NOT involve WiFi). Brian Cooper walked around the start house during the Womens DH showing the excellent live SIEMENS "ticker" (Commentator Information System) to the athletes, coaches, and ski technicians on a SIEMENS tablet PC. Their jaws dropped to the floor. Cooper brought the house down by accessing his bank account through our intranet gateway and viewing the balance in his checking account - while standing 3 meters from the start wand.
SIEMENS manufactures a line of winter-hardened "tablet" PCs, which operate even at Lake Louise's -30C temps and which have an OUTDOOR L.E.D. screen that is brilliant even in direct sunlight. At European races, Austrian coaches strap these tablet PCs to their wrists so they can follow all the splits as they wait in the finish area.
The SIEMENS C.I.S. not only carries all the live timing & scoring action, but also contains every mens & womens result for the season, sortable by discipline or country. CBC Producer Don Peppin, who has been around the block a few times, called SIEMENS's C.I.S. "the best C.I.S. I've ever seen for any sport, at any level".
It is state-of-the-art technological tours de force like this which put SIEMENS miles ahead of the previous timing service provider on the world cup tour, a wristwatch manufacturer whose teletext media technology is straight out of the 1970s.
Innovations like this make the poorly researched, factually incorrect, and nefarious anti-SIEMENS and anti-Austrian comments made in Ski Racing Magazine by dim-witted and technophobic writers Patrick Lang and Nathaniel Vinton look ridiculous.
It is only because of the Austrian Team's partnership with SIEMENS that these new features have come into ski sport. Though the Lake Louise races were not in Austria, SIEMENS was there in their capacity as technology provider to the Austrian team (OESV), not the Canadian team. The objective of Austrian team management is for "their" sport, alpine skiing, to be brought up to the same levels of popularity and media coverage as tennis, golf, and NASCAR, and the OESV are exporting their success to other national federations.
Alpine skiing on live TV takes place in a very difficult and challenging environment, and doo-doo happens. If the resident nitwits at Ski Racing want to write about our mistakes, then I'm sure they will have plenty of opportunities to continue to slag us. If not, then I'm sure they will invent them out of thin air, as they've done in the past. However, SIEMENS, the OESV team management, and the other technology companies involved with this project (ALGE, Precision Timing, Arbyte, Broder's Skunkware) will continue to push the envelope to bring the best timing, television, media information, and display technology to ski-sport.
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