Flashes of Panic

At every World Championships I’ve attended, we generally have spread along the tribunes touch-screen terminals for the “CIS” or Commentator Information System. With this we can not only see the start lists, we see splits as they happen, field events mark by mark, and we can tap through to get athlete bios, years’ best lists, and so on. Tremendously helpful, and they’ve spoiled me to the point where I can barely watch field events without them.

We don’t have them here.

There are video monitors along the tribune (clearly visible on TV, if you see the tribune at all) and by changing the channels we can see certain video feeds, a cycling update of the field events (if you have more than a screen-full of information, they rotate) and the most-recent results… and that’s it. This morning, with the heptathlon high jump going and about 40 women jumping on two pits, the screen alternated at unpredictable intervals between Group A and Group B, and each group had about four screenfuls of data cycling. It was next to impossible to determine who was jumping, who had been passing, and everything else you pretty much need to know to follow the high jump.

My neighbor is calling it “DDR technology”, referring to the former East Germany. But of course, it beats most US meets, where there’s nothing of the sort at all, and we rely on printed results after the fact to work out what happened in the field events—unless we follow them attempt-by-attempt on home-made sheets.

For me, though, trying to deliver minute-by-minute reports, it’s a real challenge to keep up.

Technorati Tags: athletics, beijing, monitors, olympic trials, olympics, video, world championships