In the Olympics how do they know who touches the side of the pool first in swimming?

Question

My dad and I have different ideas on how they figure out who touches first. I think that they have people at the end of the pool that watch them, and also there are the camera's underwater. My dad thinks there is a button or sensor on the wall that the swimmers touch.

Answer 1

They do have like ten cameras.. and there probably is a sensor, too, yes.

Answer 2

i think that your dad is right and they have a sensor that also times them down to the millisecond, cause you know that's what it comes down to in these races

Answer 3

i think your dad is right... there's should be a button or a sensor on the wall, to tell who won.

they have them at highschool and college swimming pools too!  

Answer 4

I believe they have a sensor on the wall and an underwater camera for close finishes

Answer 5

yeah they do have cameras

but only cameras wouldnt be able of determine who touces the wall first

some one can win cuz of 1/100th of a sec

so yeah

there must be sensors

Answer 6

Haha well your both kinda right but your dad is more right. lol if you look if they play in slowmotion at the end of the race there is like a black square surrounded by a big white square.  If you watch closely you can see that that the square depresses just a bit when they hit it.  So that whole square of black surrounded by the white is one big sensor to detect who hits first.  But they do have people watching, just they only ask them if there was a fault in the sensors.  Because the human eye is just not capable of seeing .01 of a second lol.  How you guys didnt have a bet on this :)

Answer 7

There is a black sensor that is at the end of the pool that detects when they finish.  

Answer 8

Anyone that watched Phelps win his seventh Gold tonight will agree, they must use sensors.

Answer 9

The Big Square is an Electronic Sensor (Underwater)...!!

Answer 10

Electronic sensors.   yeah they work in water.

Answer 11

yes your dad is right! Those black squares are very sensitive devices created for precision timing! they are not just used in swimming events but also in scientific fields such as hurricane hunting planes(for wind speed), space exploration (measuring the bounce back of radio signals from outer space to get distances) and they are even used as small os some of the probes used in medicine to look in your body during tests! The reason for the size of the ones used in swimming is based on the average area of where the swimmers may actually touch the wall (some could hit it lower or wider from the center than others).

Answer 12

FROM WHAT IVE BEEN WATCHIN ...WHEN THEY SHOW THE UNDER WATER CAMERA VIEW IT SEEMS LIKE THEY HAVE A BLACK SQUARE LOOKING THING (NOT SURE WUT TO CALL IT) LOL...N SO THEY REACH OUT FOR IT I GUESS ITS SOMETHING AUTOMATIC THAT LETS THE COMPUTERS OR MONUITORS NO WHO HAS TOUCHED IT FIRST IM NOT SURE ...

Answer 13

There are touch pads on the wall. Do you notice that black cross marking when they finish. The swimmer has to touch inside that area.

There are also touch pads on the top of the blocks. They are used during the relays to see if there was a break. So if the weight comes off the block before the pad on the wall is touched by the swimmer in the water that means that the next swimmer went to early and the team would be disqualified.

I'm not sure if the touch pad on the block is used to start the clock for races. Probably not as the clock should start with the gun.

The people watching are they to make sure it is a legal touch. In breaststroke and butterfly they have to touch with both hands. That's what the people watching check. I think, at the last Olympics there was one butterfly swimmer who touched with one hand, which just stopped the clocker quicker than the second swimmer.

Edit: it's definitely not cameras for swimming. Cameras can only be useful when people have to cross over a line. So the camera can clearly "see" every person corssing the line. In swimming they touch and stop on the line, that would obstruct the view of the camera for swimmers behind the person who stopped first.

Answer 14

I agree with your dad, a sensor on the wall.

Answer 15

It’s hard to comprehend just how backward things were.  As late as 1961, the 1500m free final at the indoor nationals at Yale University was contested without any lane lines. Part of the race strategy was avoiding head-on collisions.  

The first step out of this technological backwater came with timing systems.  In the mid-1950s, Counsilman attached a timing motor to a 15-inch clock face and gave competitive swimming its own version of an electronic babysitter – the pace clock.

About the same time, Bill Parkinson, a physics professor at the University of Michigan, responded to a challenge from a fellow swimming official.  Both knew they were wrong as many times as they were right when judging close finishes.  With the splashing and underwater touches, they could only guess at what they saw.  The timing was hardly better.  Mechanical stopwatches (think 60 Minutes) allowed for accuracy no better than one-tenth of a second.  Timers often varied on the same race by as much as 4/10 of a second.

“Build something to take the guesswork out of it,” Parkinson recalls his friend saying.  ÃƒÂ¢Ã‚€ÂœOthers have tried, but I know you can do it.”  The subtle dare hooked Parkinson, part-time, for the next eight years.

He started by having his wife, Martha, sew copper wire in a zigzag pattern into a rubber mat, which he mounted on an aluminum plate.  His thinking was that when a swimmer pressed the mat, the wires would touch the aluminum plate, thereby completing a circuit and triggering an electrical timepiece and placing system.  Parkinson attached a second sheet of rubber over the first to ensure insulation.

How to deal with the water pressure was a more vexing problem.  The pad had to distinguish between the relatively soft touch of a swimmer and the considerable pressure of water, which can be enormous even at a depth of only a few inches.  Parkinson’s solution was the fill the pad with non-conductive, silicone oil.  The oil neutralized the water pressure, keeping it from closing the circuit, but offered no resistance to a hand touch.

“It was ingenuous what he came up with,” says Bob Clauson of Colorado Time Systems, the Denver-based company that would corner the market in the United States.

By the late 1950s, Parkinson had a six-pad system up and running, complete with vacuum tubes that filled a cabinet-size console.  Coaches, however, were cool to Parkinson’s invention.  They worried the touch pad would shorten the course of the race and their swimmers would slip on the pads during turns, two groundless concerns that Parkinson worked around by devising a hinge that dropped the pads into place just prior to the finish.

Still, the coaching community harbored doubts until the 1960 Olympics, when American Lance Larson apparently beat Australian John Devitt in the 100m freestyle, only to lose out on the gold medal when a judge who should not have had a say in the matter asserted himself as the arbitrator.  What was arguably the most egregious officiating faux pas in competitive swimming history gave Parkinson standing.  A commercial company began to manufacture his system in 1962.  The NCAA weighed in with its approval.  Parkinson’s system and close knockoffs began to appear at more and more meets.

However, these early systems weren’t quite ready for prime time.  Such status wouldn’t come until the 1970s, when Colorado Time Systems put a print head in the console, thereby fully automating the process – from judging, to timing, to recording results.  Like air conditioning in a car, electronic timing offered such ease and comfort that it morphed from optional into a standard piece of equipment.

Parkinson, who still keeps office hours at the University of Michigan, could have made a handsome sum of money from his part-time work.  Instead, he assigned the patent to the university’s athletic department and stayed with his first love of teaching and research.  He left it to others to develop the beep start, the affordable wall displays and the slick software that keeps meets running almost as if on autopilot.

Answer 16

This is the same question another person asked before. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...

It was pretty unanimous that there is some sort of touch pad or sensor in the wall of the pool that records the swimmers' times.

Answer 17

If you splash the watter tough enough it would activate the sensor before you actually touch it. That's how Phelps won the race.

Answer 18

Your Dad is right-there are touch and lazier monitors. Before all the electronics, decision was by human judges