Why planning the Olympics is time well spent

Rio’s stopwatches, sensors and scoreboards have taken Omega's Alain Zobrist and his team three long years to perfect

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Omega's job actually starts about three years before an Olympics opening ceremony. We’ve had people in Rio for all that time because, even though the venues might not have broken ground three years out, we have a lot of technical requirements and, of course, we have to do test runs as early as we can. In Rio, every sport has already had trial events to make sure the systems are working correctly.

People sometimes ask me if we have reached the ultimate in the measurement of an athlete’s performance. After all, we have the ability to measure down to a millionth of a second, which is beyond the requirements of individual sports. This is then adjusted to the event in question – so if it’s an athletics competition, we give the result in hundredths of a second, if it’s track cycling, in thousandths, and so on. And this time, in Rio, we have much the same scale of operation as we were in London – about 450 tons of equipment and a team of around 480 technicians, plus 800 to 1,000 volunteers. So is there any way to improve how we time Olympic events? The answer is yes.

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