The Champion of the Chip
When "The Chip" Came to Boston, It Nearly Found Itself Locked Out.
By
Julia Emmons
of
Marathon & Beyond
5:00 a.m., Monday, 15 April 1996, Boston Hilton. The affable man from Nagano,
Japan, Eiichi Kaneshiro, and I stood in the lobby clutching containers of
lukewarm coffee. We were awaiting the arrival of Wim Meijer and Peter Bruinink
of the Netherlands, along with Mike Burns, their American colleague, and a
couple of other assorted technical types. We had requested the opportunity to
tag along and watch Meijer and the others set up the ChampionChip timing system
for the "100th" running of the Boston Marathon.
Neither Eiichi nor I had ever seen The Chip in action, though we would soon
be responsible for its use in the Olympic Games, I in the upcoming Summer Games
in Atlanta and he for the 1998 Winter Games.
The Chip had been invented and developed in Europe by Meijer and Bruinink and
was finally making its way to the States. Runners tie The Chip to their
shoelace. The Chip is encoded with a runner's race number, and as the runner
strides over rubber mats at start, finish, and intermediate points in the race,
electronic sensors wired beneath the mats relay the runner's number to computers
gathered on the sideline. Thus, a runner's exact start time and finish time is
captured electronically, giving him or her the true time it took to run the
distance, irrespective of the time it took each to reach the starting line.
Boston Marathon organizers had arranged with Meijer and Bruinink to use the
system to time the 38,000 runners in the wildly celebratory running of Boston's
"100th."
The IAAF, the international federation governing track and field, supported
our desire to use the chip system to track the 5K splits in the Olympic women's
and men's marathons. Start and finish times would be recorded in the Olympic
Stadium using equipment used for all the other running events. As director of
the marathons, I needed to understand not only how The Chip system worked in
practice, but also the vans, volunteers, tables, and other equipment essential
for support.
Thus, I had flown to Boston to befriend the ChampionChip personnel and get
permission to observe the operation. Meijer and Bruinink could not have been
more gracious; not only would I be able to watch the system work, but I was also
invited to be part of the crew.
Eiichi and I had little time to wait before Meijer and Bruinink arrived.
Tall, intense, with a long blonde flattop and cheery blue eyes behind round
glasses, Meijer was the faster-paced and more Americanized of the two. Equally
tall, though quieter, with the rosy cheeks of a cold-climate outdoorsman,
Bruinink seemed the more business-oriented. Both spoke the excellent colloquial
English of the European educated classes. "Let's go," declared the
ever-organized Meijer. "We'll need the two of you to drive as well. Okay?"
Put Us In, Coach
Eiichi and I were a bit startled, as we had thought
being part of the crew meant moving the occasional box. Eager to be of use,
however, we both assented quickly and trotted along in Meijer's wake to find our
vehicles.
