50,000+ Opportunities to delight customers on the run

Sport mass event organizers now have access to a simple, robust, and cost-effective technology. It enables them not only to offer accurate timing information, but can also make their events unique, by providing an enriched, multi-platform experience to those taking part.

Running is a major participation sport today, and organizing such enormous mass-participation events is certainly a challenge – events involving 10,000 or more participants are almost impossible to time manually, and huge crowds at the start line mean that an individual participant can lose precious seconds or even minutes before they actually reach the start of the course.

Seasoned runners tend to use the latest technology, in terms of clothing, shoes, smartphone apps to monitor their physical status, GPS to monitor their progress, as well as timing devices – but they still want to challenge themselves and get the most out of their experience.

Many participants are already up to speed with the latest technology, therefore organizers have to work really hard to offer them a unique experience. So, beyond the absolute priority of providing accurate timing information in real time to thousands of participants, how can event organizers engage runners more fully, to give them a more rewarding experience? More importantly, how can they provide added value to the runners’ experience without breaking the bank?

The use of RFID technology offers organizers a low-cost means of not only providing accurate timing information to runners in real time, but also many extra services that add value to the whole event and to the participants’ experience.

RFID technology leads the race
Traditionally, races were either timed by hand, with operators pressing a stopwatch, or by using video camera systems – an obvious challenge for organizers, when tens of thousands of participants are running past the finish line! For example, the first New York Marathon in 1970 looped through Central Park several times, and featured 127 entrants, of whom 55 crossed the finish line. Since then, the race has grown massively – the 2014 New York City Marathon broke records again, with 50,000+ people finishing the race – all using Smartrac inlays.

RFID transponder timing (also known as chip timing or RFID timing) has been adopted to provide the answer to both participants’ high expectations, and the competitive challenges organizers have to face. The technology provides timing information that is accurate, independent of human input, and able to cope with thousands of timing signals. Perhaps more importantly, such UHF inlays are extremely cheap to produce – so cheap that they can be thrown away at the end of the race.

The concept is simple: each participant is given a race bib equipped with an RFID transponder, which emits a unique code that is detected by antennas positioned at strategic points around the course or track.

The antennas are connected to a decoder, which identifies the unique transponder code and calculates the exact time elapsed when the transponder passes a timing point. Some timing systems require the use of a mat on the ground at the timing points, while other systems install timing points that use vertically oriented readers.

The technology has already matured greatly since it was first used: the size of the RFID inlay used in sports timing has decreased from A4 size to less than 10x3cm, and the gates used for recording time signals, which used to be around 1 meter wide, can now be of virtually unlimited width.

Benefits for organizers and participants alike
Aside from providing independent timing information down to fractions of a second, using this technology provides many added benefits.