Ask Picabo Street about the time of her life, and she might say it's 1/100th of a second. That's the margin by which she won a gold medal in Nagano.
Time really is precious. And when it comes to the Olympics, it has to be precise, too, said Rob Wilson, a marketing director and sports liaison for Seiko, charged with helping the 2002 Winter Games run like clockwork. People looking for new, whiz-bang technology will find some in the timing efforts, he said. But the most important thing isn't being cutting-edge. "Ninety percent of our fixation is just getting things right."
Wilson laughs about the first year Seiko, still a family-owned business, participated in the Games: 1964 in Tokyo. The company's brand-new, built-for-the-Games quartz timing device was the backup system if something happened to a dozen guys lined up on the finish line with stopwatches. For the bobsled race, a guy on the hill with a phone shouted "Go," and the timekeepers at the bottom heard him and pressed their stopwatches, then eagle-eyed the sled to figure out when to stop them.
The Olympics have been good to Seiko, Wilson said. "It sounds ridiculous, but in the early 1960s, Seiko was bumbling along, being ordinary. They lifted us. We had lots of developments for the Games. The Games made us better, and we continue to support them."
One way the Games have been good to the company, he acknowledges, is that they put the company's name out there ? everywhere. Watch NBC coverage and you'll periodically see, next to the clock, the word Seiko.
This year, innovation includes a transponder-based timing system in biathlon and cross country skiing, which simplifies timing where there are staggered starts and difficulty telling who is whom. Each athlete wears a transponder the size of a quarter on each ankle. All results, regardless of sport, are in "real time." With the transponders, it's possible to keep track of exactly where each athlete is, competitively.
"Olympic Time" is another just-for-Utah twist. All the official clocks, the timing devices, the computers linked to venues, even the arrowhead countdown clock by the Delta Center have been synchronized ? something never done before ? using GPS technology for timing so accurate that Seiko boasts only 1 second is lost every 20,000 years.
During the Games, Seiko will take about 90,000 measurements, many of them critical to the results. Some of the timing (luge, for instance) has to be accurate to within 1/1,000th of a second.
Besides the feeds to the scoreboard and television broadcast, the results are sent to a results service right away, "where they start to cook it up in all sorts of ways," Wilson said.
The preparation for the Salt Lake Games began back in 1997, as Seiko worked with SLOC. In 1999, Seiko sent a man to live and work in Utah, familiarizing himself with things like terrain on which the timing will occur for both the Olympics and the Paralympics, which Seiko also is timing.
Paralympic timing is trickier. Some of the sports have a handicap built into the score, based on the athlete's disability, sort of like a golfing handicap, Wilson said.
A year ago, the timing was tested in World Cup and World Championship events. But no one's taking any chances. Each timing system has at least three levels of backup, Wilson said, and some have four. Each backup system is tailored to both the sport and venue.
The well-known timing/watch company also has 150 employees working the Games, as well as 250 SLOC volunteers. They'll time events and measure speed and distance, depending on what's needed for the scoring. They'll also run the real-time scoreboards (six will be left behind, a gift to Utah, along with various other equipment), feed times directly to television and more.
Let the good times roll.
E-MAIL: lois@desnews.com