Posted by monetta roberts on March 16, 2007 at 07:06:01:
In Reply to: Re: Chips for the Trail posted by Gabriel Wingard on March 15, 2007 at 21:25:18:
All;
For what it's worth: in road races that do use timing chips, the value of the chips to racers is only to give them an accurate account of the time it took them to travel from the start line to the finish line (of the course that's measured on the tangents with an added bonus of a "fudge factor" of an extra few meters, if I am recalling correctly, making all certified courses ever-so-slightly long to save any potential national or world records from being rescinded if the automatically remeasured course falls short). Anyway, in mega-races where it can take minutes to even reach the start line after the starting gun sounds, it's nice to have a chip so you know exactly how long you took to cover the course---nevermind that you could barely move in the first 1/4 mile or so due to congestion. In none of the maybe hundreds (?) of road races that I've been in with timing chips have chip times ever been used to determine awards---awards are generally *always* based on gun time for exactly the reason the previous poster stated---otherwise a person could be bested by even less than a second, and by someone he or she couldn't even see because it happend at a sooner or later time. I'm no expert, but I've never even heard of road race awards being based on chip times; they're merely for convenience of compiling results data, primarily, and giving a more accurate start to finish time, secondarily.
Jeez, I sound like a race geek!
Ok,
Mo