A new Olympics, new disciplines to be measured in a few months for Omega, while the modern Olympics return to their native land.
In 2024, there will be sport. And even a lot of sport. After the Rugby World Cup this year, the Tour de France will even have to be careful not to cross paths with the Paris Olympic Games, from July 26 to August 11, 2024. What do these two major competitions have in common, the most followed in the world, apart from the passion for sport? When the legendary cycling event, the next route of which will be revealed in a few days, is timed by Tissot, Omega will sign its 31st Olympiad next year as official timekeeper. These two major watch brands of the Swatch Group will be able to count on the expertise in this field of Swiss Timing. This subsidiary of the Swiss watchmaking giant has in fact specialized for more than five decades not only in sports timing, but also in the invention of new technologies to achieve this. Objective: ever more precision, data processed and information broadcast in real time.
Omega is the official timekeeper of the next Jo de Paris 2024. IAN SCHEMPER
Recently, Omega inaugurated the countdown to the Olympic Games at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. He counts down the hours, minutes and seconds remaining until the opening ceremony. Since 1932, the watchmaker has above all developed and introduced some of the most important timing technologies in the field of sport, in order to record the victories and records of the best athletes in the world. “We will also celebrate the pioneering spirit of the Olympic Games in Paris, where it all began,” Raynald Aeschlimann, president of Omega, recently confided. In 2024, it will be the event of the year, in France, but also throughout the world. »
Omega is the official timekeeper of the next Jo de Paris 2024. IAN SCHEMPER
The timekeeper’s mission: to ensure that all the data is 100% accurate, in order to award more than a hundred gold medals, but also to determine the podium. Thus, the last Tokyo Games will have represented 1.3 million results and data to process… The brand’s greatest involvement in an Olympic Games in eighty-nine years of timekeeping. The figures speak for themselves: a total of 339 events in 33 different sports will be timed. To achieve this, 400 tonnes of equipment, 530 professional timers and 900 volunteers will have been present on site, sometimes many weeks before the start of the competitions. It was necessary to design 350 scoreboards adapted to all sports, as well as 85 public scoreboards, all connected by a whopping 200 km of cables and optical fibers. In total, 171 Olympic records will have been measured during Tokyo 2020, as well as 32 world records. We are a long way from the few Omega chronographs precise to a tenth of a second used during the 1932 Olympics…
The brand will have made particular use of its iconic measurement technologies in Japan, such as its electronic starter guns and its photo-finish cameras, capable of capturing 10,000 photos per second. But progress is constant, Olympiad after Olympiad: in 2007, high-speed videos (HSV) were already capable of capturing 100 images per second, to measure the victory of the legendary Michael Phelps in the 100-meter butterfly.
Omega is the official timekeeper of the next Jo de Paris 2024. IAN SCHEMPER
In 2011, new starting blocks were introduced capable of measuring the pushing force of runners and better detecting false starts. Among the innovations of the Rio Olympics in 2016 are the athletic photocells made up of four cells instead of two as well as the Athletic false start detection system improved thanks to sensors measuring the force exerted on the footrest 4,000 times per second . For the archery event, two scanners calculate the position of the arrow when it hits the target with an accuracy of 0.2 mm. A task simply impossible for the human eye. New sports require a new approach to timekeeping. This was the case in Tokyo in 2020 with the “speed” climbing events: the touchpad technology used for years in swimming was transposed to the top of the wall. It is thus the climber’s hand that stops the clock.
The special Paris 2024 edition of the Omega Seamaster 300M, only on sale in Paris. Omega
What will be the new frontier of timekeeping next year, in Paris? Without a doubt the movement sensors and positioning systems, already used in seven sporting events in Tokyo. Data which is not part of the regulations, but which allows the spectator to be further immersed in the competition, by indicating live both the speed of a ball and that of a swimmer, or the position of runners. “These movement sensors that we have been creating for almost ten years and which we apply to certain sports are used by athletes but also by coaches, commentators and spectators watching television,” explained Raynald Aeschlimann. With six cameras, we can, for example, know the speed, height or length of a figure skater’s jump. »
2023-10-20 14:20:42
#scenes #records
