Hello,
With all of the blatant drafting and all of the people who get penalties complaining that "I didn't do it" why dont the motorcycle enforcement dudes have video recorders. Given the fact that most are good for an hour or two and that you can erase any non cheaters video on the fly, it seems like its a pretty simple cheap way of having instant replay.
Styrrell
…not to mention the bottle launched by another pro. Looked like the ladies were just as guilty in the drafting department to me.
Make sense. The only down side I see would be cost, another $2 bucks a race.
This just opens a much larger can of worms.
Doesn’t work in any other sport, triathlon is no different…
I don’t think it would work perfectly ie get every case of drafting without any false positives, but I think it would work better than the current system.
In other sports Video works pretty good, not perfect but better than relying on human eyes. Besides my main objection to video review in other sports is that it add too much time to already long gametimes. Here all of the review would be done at the end.
Styrrell
Who is going to pay for the added cost? Shall we just take it out of the monsterous pro purses? Or…perhaps we can increase USAT fees 50%?
I don’t see any problem with officiating and think the USAT Cat 1 and 2 officials do a great job. They know the course, they know the rules…and in most cases, know the competitors. Having a back-up (camera) in place is unminding their authority to hold a clean race. There are simply too many conditions exist which a camera could not capture.
Perhaps a decent concept, but in reality don’t think it would ever fly…
I’ve never gotten a penalty and I suspect that you’ve never gotten one either. Read the threads after a big IM race. Everyone who gets a penalty thinks the ref was in error. As far as cost I dont see it being a big deal. Im not talking every local race, but mostly the biggies. How many motorcycles are at a IM race, maybe 20. That 20 times $500 = 10, 000. Their were about 6 IM USA races last year with about 2500 entrants. Thats 15000 entrants. So instead of $400 to enter that $402 or so (including batteries). The next year they could charge and extra 5 cents to cover the cost of batteries.
I could easily accept that it might not work based on administrative grounds (time to review, endless arguements) etc, but with IM cost should never be a concern to putting on a better race, not at their prices. As far as undermining an official, I’ve got to believe that most would like to be able to point to a tape and say “there you’re two feet behind that guy for 17 seconds”.
Styrrell
Using the cameras would still require too much manual labor and camera views can be subjective. Instead, we need the timing chip companies to apply RFID technology into their timing chips.
RFID chips can be scanned from several yards away.
A motorcycle marshall would merely ride by, scan you, and be able to tell how long you were within a given distance of another athlete’s chip. (Or, relative position on the course, etc.) The uses are limitless.
These things are small enough they could be included in the design of existing timing chips. As a matter of fact, there are starting to be RFID chips in consumer products that Walmart is selling. Other uses record children as they enter and exit schools each day so that parents will know where their children are. McDonald’s has some test markets that use them instead of cash. You merely go through the drive-thru, are automatically scanned for your purchase and your bank account debited. They are also used in warehouse inventory control. They are small, cheap, and disposable.
I’m sure we’ll see these in the future design of timing chips. Essentially, every rule infraction could be recorded. The question is whether or not we will accept that much accountability. Baseball is going though that little battle right now w/ the K-Zone machines that record strikes and balls better than the umpire does. The technology is being rejected by the masses as being too perfect and hurting the game.
Some interprising individual will use this RFID technology in timing chip development very soon…