Wireless timing a race-winner

By PETER GRIFFIN

Organisers of last week's down-hill endurance ski race at Queenstown's Coronet Peak reaped the rewards of having an IT heavyweight as their chief sponsor.

Apart from putting a stack of cash into the event, Hewlett Packard again took charge of developing the timing system for the race, which included competitors from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, USA and Canada.

HP project manager Carolyn Hooper said months of planning had ensured this year's timing system was the most sophisticated in the three-year history of the HP50K.

Previous glitches were avoided as HP introduced a wireless timing system from Dutch company AMB-it.

Skier had wireless transponder strapped to their legs; these sent out a signal consisting of a unique number registered to each competitor.

Buried a few feet between the start and finish lines were detection "loops" that recorded the times at which skiers passed over them. The times were then passed through a decoder and fed into an Oracle database in real-time giving racers an idea of their performance throughout the night as they raced to the chairlift to take them back up the slopes.

The numbers were also piped down the mountain via a frame relay link to HP's development centre in Christchurch where they were posted to the race website at www.hp50k.com (Flash 6 is required). Cameras around Coronet Peak provided a continuous feed of video to the internet during the 14-hour race, which was won by the German men's team won for the third year in a row. The Canadian women's team stole victory from the Australians in the final stages.

* Peter Griffin attended the HP50K event as a guest of Hewlett Packard