Tissot: Timing Le Tour de France

How the Swiss watchmaker is leading the way in winner-defining technology in the high-speed world of cycling

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(Image credit: WWW.XEPO.WS)

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.

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