PARIS — The moment an Olympic athlete begins competition their every move is being watched, analyzed and broadcast. Whether they are running, jumping, throwing, swimming, serving, cycling or spinning, a combination of sensor technology and computer vision translates athletes’ movements into data, helping judges and audiences make sense of critical moments that can happen within fractions of seconds. OMEGA, best known as the Swiss luxury watchmaker, is also the official timekeeper of the Olympic and Paralympic Games and has descended on Paris with 550 staff members and 350 tonnes of equipment to play a hand in every sport in the program.
While each Olympics sees advancements in the timing and visualization technology used, OMEGA CEO Alain Zobrist says it is not yet at a point where it can replace human judges overseeing subjectively scored sports such as gymnastics and diving. “I don’t want to predict anything,” he said from the timekeeping room at the Paris La Défense Arena, where swimming events will be held. “It will depend on how the rules of the federations will evolve.
For now, we are using the technologies to be the support systems for the judges. It may take a little while for the technology to become a little bit more mature, for judges to feel a little bit more comfortable with it. It’s always a rather long process.
It took 20 years for manual timekeeping to be replaced with electronic timekeeping — so it will take about the same time frame for that.