Tissot: Timing Le Tour de France

As official timekeeper of Le Tour de France, for the Tissot team, the finish line is the intense focus of operations. As soon as a sprinter – Britain's Mark Cavendish or Slovak Peter Sagan – puts tyre rubber past laser beam, two tons of highly specialised equipment in the team's truck facility flashes into co-ordinated action. Back in 2017, for instance, this meticulously choreographed combination of tactically positioned infrared photo cells, tracking devices, transponders and digital cameras capable of capturing 10,000 images per second was able to separate winner Marcel Kittel and second placed Edvald Boasson Hagen by an almost imperceptible 0.0003 seconds. A solitary slice of stop motion imagery, just six millimetres, one single pixel between the two riders.

Tissot achieves such incredible accuracy under pressure using state-of-the-art photo-finish camera technology developed by its Swiss Timing facility based in Corgemont, nestled in the Swiss canton of Bern. Instead of a conventional shutter the camera has a vertical slit of an aperture, only one pixel wide, which is carefully aligned with the finish line. Through the slit, the camera takes a 10,000 frames-a-second view of the finish as the riders flash through, each frame a perfectly rendered, single pixel-wide, time-lapse image. A picture of the finishing athletes, stretched out, digitally defined and hyper real.

Pascal Rossier, head of sports operations and services at Swiss Timing for the Swatch Group (Tissot's owners) offers further explanation. "Imagine you are at an office window and you close the vertical blinds, so that there is just a small line of daylight between each shutter. Now, imagine a mobile object – a car or a bicycle – moving on the other side of the blind's verticals. What you are going to see is thin slices of movement as the front wheel passes through those lines. It's the same principle with the photo finish." The camera is, explains Pascal, with a grin, a timing machine "which is filming within the time…if that makes sense".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

The Tissot marque has been attuned to the marginal gains of professional cycling for decades. The official timekeeper of the Tour de France from 1988 to 1992, in 1995 Tissot affiliated with the UCI (International Cycling Union), becoming the official timekeeper of road, trail, mountain-bike and BMX cycling world championships and world cup cycling time trials. Tissot returned to Le Tour in 2016, and now manages the stopwatches at Paris–Nice, Paris Roubaix, La Paris–Tours, Criterium du Dauphine and the Vuelta a Espana.

Over at Le Locle (Tissot's 160-year-old base in the Canton of Neuchatel) designers have distilled Tissot's velo-heritage and the elite timing team's expertise into a range of handsome chronographs for both amateur cycling enthusiasts and fans of Le Tour. Details include a rubber strap design inspired by the head tube and fork profile of a racing bike. Pushers on the side of the case resemble brake levers and the asphalt-effect dial references a wheel and its spokes. The case back is cast with a rear cassette configuration while the underside of the band is perforated with a bike chain tessellation to help air condition a rider's wrist as he staggers up Galibier or Col de la Croix de Fer. The watch comes accented in red for La Vuelta and, naturellement, yellow for Le Tour.

tissotwatches.com