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Winter Games In The Garden
posted: 4 June 2009 Timing Sports staff achieved two remarkable firsts at the SBS Christchurch Marathon on the last day of May. Held in New Zealand's "garden city", the event has gone from strength to strength in recent years and features some of the flattest and fastest 10k, half marathon and full marathon tracks you will find anywhere. Over five and a half thousand athletes enrolled for the event, including nearly one thousand kids in the 2k and 5k kids fun runs.
For 2009, one slightly less welcome visitor was a wintery blast which blew in, it seemed, directly from the South Pole. Timing Sport's staff preparing the timing points at 6am that morning achieved a notable first; the first time we have set up our mats in a hail storm!
One of the unique features of this event is that all of the adult races; 10k, half marathon and marathon, start together. As over 4,000 shivering figures assembled outside the Town Hall for the 9am start, the weather delivered another unwelcome reminder with the second heavy hail storm of the day. Spirits, however, were undimmed and the weather quickly changed to match the excited faces of the runners, with most of the rest of the day cold, but sunny and clear.
It wasn't completely over for the weather, however. At midday, hundreds of shivering kids aged from 13 all the way down to 5, lined up in five waves for their event. Just as the youngest kids were getting ready to take off - encouraged by their parents to the point where some needed a hefty shove to get them going - another "first" was achieved. For the first time at any Timing Sports timed event, we set the athletes off across our timing mats in the snow!
Overwhelmed by the occasion, some of the five year olds were in tears as they started the run. Timing Sports' staff were in tears because they couldn't feel their fingers.
Despite the chilly temperatures, full results from the event were online within an hour of the final finisher, including half way split times for the marathon runners and, for the first time, net times for the kids. Race commentators were also once again wowed by the Timing Sports' iPod spotter system, calling the names of finisher's from the front of the stage instead of being stuck behind a desk reading from a laptop.
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Who Are We?
Based in Auckland, New Zealand and Brisbane, Australia, Timing Sports employ state of the art RFID technologies to record, time and rank almost half a million athletes per year in many of the biggest sporting events in the world. We use next generation IPICO dual frequency systems as well as legacy ChampionChip digital equipment for a service offering of functionality and reliability that is without equal. |
 Live Internet Results |
 Timing Sports pioneered seamless integration of race results with live webcasts and can offer a mature and tested product for major events |
Did You Know?
Each year, in the course of four frenetic months, Timing Sports Australia time six of the eight largest events on the contintent ... all of them having over 25,000 entrants!
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 Results on an iPhone? Who Else ... |
 Another world first for timing sports. We now provide race organisers and commentators with iPhones which show live finisher data |
Did You Know?
Timing Sports NZ provide a turnkey timing and registration service for New Zealand's two largest electronically timed events; the Auckland Marathon and Wellington Round the Bays.
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 Live SMS Results |
 Timing Sports can send customised SMS text messages - virtually instantaneously - when an athlete crosses one of our timing locations |
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