So if I had the opportunity to tell the tri One O One folks what would make really impressive race day coverage I would say these:
What would you say?
Being able to sign up for email or text message alerts when certain athletes crossed a timing mat (transitions, mid points etc?).
What would be really cool would be an athlete tracker where you could get an alert that someone was approaching a timing mat where there was a live feed camera. If you missed the live feed then something that started 30 seconds before the person comes into camera view. So something similar to the watch me finish links from Ironman except live or at least available during the event.
The other really interesting thing would be a course map that you could select some athletes to see with their progress shown on the map. Even if all that was shown was their times at certain points it would be very nice. Ideally you could show exactly where they were but that isn’t really technically feasible with the current timing chips. Perhaps rough estimates for the top 5 or so would be possible though.
If the real time data was available I’ll bet it could be put together with the google maps API without too much trouble.
So what would you request if you could ask for better live raceday coverage?
WHat would be really cool besides the colorfull live coverage of the pro race that we are doing, are spots all along the course, where the chips pick up everyones times. I don’t really care about any static video of AG’ers, or the pros for that matter. The coverage of Hawaii was great because they had the 8 camera feed of the networks to choose from, but that is impratical for smaller events with no big network coverage. The static cameras they have been using just piss me off. How long can you look at an empty transition area, and then see 10 seconds of someone going in and out of the picture with no commentary. But if you could see the history of the athlete all through the course, like maybe 3 bike splits, and 3 or 4 run splits, that would be cool. Especially in some sort of real time, like before someone posted it on the forum here. As I see it, it would just require some more timing mats, and the ability to upload those results to the net. My guess is that that technology is already in place… What do you think, would it be too costly, or just a few bucks more???
Great idea… if this were a “wish list” I’d like a “broadcast” timing mat every k for the run and every 5k for the bike.
Another cool thing would be to supply GPS on the timing chip. We could have a layout of the course on the screen and watch the real time progress of the athletes we selected. Non-military GPS devices are only accurate to within 5-15 metres, so we couldn’t use this system to track drafting.
I agree that the static cameras are pretty boring. Yes they are better with commentary, but the commentary is only interesting when the pros come by. They are also interesting when someone that you know comes by. The problem is that unless the someone that you know is a pro then you aren’t likely to see them on the static camera unless you watch a really long time. That is why I was thinking of a static camera that you could view specific athletes at, a timing mat would identify the athlete and the link would show them coming by. Actually it wouldn’t even need to be a video feed, still pictures would be interesting as well.
I’m always amazed that the course photographers haven’t yet come up with a way to tie their digital camera to a timing mat. It must be a big pain the the pattoot to sort through all the pictures to determine bib numbers.
I would agree though that it would probably be more interesting to just have a bunch more timing spots so you could track the progress of people you were interested in even without pictures/video. If all the organizer did was make real time data available in some standard fashion (I think there are XML standards for this), then someone would build interesting trackers.
As for cost, yes the timing systems are an expensive piece or rental. Although I suspect for a larger event it would be a pretty minor upgrade to double the number of timing points. I suspect one challenge is that some of these systems seem to only collect data, the data is later retrieved and processed. In addition they have no network or internet connection to communicate in realtime. A GPRS or Edge cell phone data network could probably fix that though.
i agree with most- i think more timing mats and real time data would be great to track someone. a few years back i did chicago, and they had the athlete tracker there. of the 5 people i had tracking me, only 1 got any kind of updates.
i think it would be great to have a timing mat at every mile on the run course. something that would be uploaded immediately.
i don’t know what the cost is, but i’m sure they have the technology to do it…