Bib Chips and Cross Country: Is It a Good Marriage?

Bib chips, such as the one shown here, have a lot of advantages. But do those advantages outweigh their liabilities?

Forty years ago, cross country got along just fine without the assistance of technological innovation. A few meets today are still scored much the same way they were back in the day--stickers, popsicle sticks, sheets of poster board, and the like. It worked well enough, but technology has made a lot of things easier and faster in the interim.

Technology has influenced both scoring and timing. Where scoring is concerned, techology's impact has been decidedly positive. Scoring programs calculate team scores much faster, and much more accurately, than pencil-and-paper methods. While there are folks who have resisted the aid of computers in scoring into their own meets, there really is no organized movement to turn back the clock on meet scoring and do it the way it was done 40 years ago.

The same can't be said for timing. Timing happens in a lot of different ways these days and there is no consensus on what is the best method to do the meet timing. One crucial question here concerns whether or not technology should take over the human role in determining place.

Some current methods of timing still rely heavily on the human element. Pressing a button as each runner crosses the finish line is perhaps the most widespread timing procedure in use today. This method still requires a human or humans to determine place and is still subject to the variability of the human thumb or finger pressing the button. It does, however, remove the element of transcription of times as, in most cases, these times are simply uploaded into a scoring program.

A few meets use a FinishLynx (or other similar device) timing system that captures a photograph of each runner as he or she crosses the finish line. The photograph becomes part of a computer file that allows for accurately determining a runner's time and order of finish. But, the system is not in widespread use at cross country meets, partly because the process is a little cumbersome for large numbers of runners and partly because a cross country finish line can't be micromanaged quite as easily as a track finish line.

In the last decade or so, chip timing as come into widespread use at larger and, generally speaking, more important meets.

The first generation of chip timing was reusable chips affixed to the shoes or the ankles of the runners. At least initially, these chips were fairly expensive, although the price has come down some over time. Currently, shoe chips can be purchased at a unit cost of less than two dollars each. They were at the start, and remain today, both a little bulky and somewhat labor-intensive to affix and remove. There have even been chips that attach via velcro straps to runners' ankles. While these chips are easier for the competitor to attach and remove, there are some issues of bulk and sanitation associated with ankle chips.

But we live in the day of innovation. The latest innovation in determining place and time is bib chips. A bib chip is a small foam and mylar device affixed to the back of a runner's bib as seen in the cover photo of this article. And, at first blush, it seems like the perfect solution. It's lightweight. It adds essentially nothing to the bulk of a race bib. It's unobtrusive, relatively inexpensive (costing about $1.10 each), and doesn't need to be returned at the end of the race. All of the downsides of shoe chips eliminated in one fell stroke!

Or so it would seem. But all these advantages come at a cost.

The shoe chip was built on the idea that a timing mat at the finish line picks up the chip from each runner's shoe as he/she crosses the finish line. The antennae that detect the chips are mostly "up-looking" and do not have to be set to extremely high sensitivity because the chips pass more or less directly over the timing mat. Nevertheless, there is still some variability in the distance at which the chips of various runners are detected by the timing mat.

The bib chip, however, passes over the timing mat at a much higher level (something like four feet higher, but with some individual variability). Consequently, the antennae that detect the chips must be much more sensitive. And, the antennae must become a bit more "out-looking" to ensure that each runner is detected. The trade-off here is that, at higher levels of sensitivity, it becomes much less predictable where each incoming runner is detected.

Benji Durden, who has likely timed more cross country races in Colorado than anyone else (and has 30-some years of experience in the business), explains, "The bib chips are detected by the timing antennas as far away as 50 feet in some setups, and most setups detect them well in front of the finish line. The software must make some judgments about when the runner has finished. This is fine for large road races where timing to the nearest second is good enough. For cross country meets, close finishes are common and accuracy to the nearest thousandth of a second is required at times to get the right order. Only FinishLynx systems are that accurate."

Durden's assessment of the variability of places assigned to runners is easily verified by video review of races using bib chips. I personally reviewed finish line video of the first 90 places of the 2011 girls championship race at NXR-SW. In that video, I found five clear examples of where the bib chip timing mixed up the finishes of two to four individuals. In fairness, none of those mix-ups made for any material differences in team scoring, but the potential for material differences is certainly there.

Additionally, I received two e-mails from coaches whose athletes had been misplaced in the results by mutliple seconds and several places (these were separate incidents and both involved races other than the girls championship race). I was able to verify one of these claims through review of finish line video. No video exists (at least none that I have access to) in the other case.

At this point, it would seem the bib chip timing is a sometimes suspect method of determining time and place in cross country races. That's not to say that further developments in techonology will not eliminate or reduce this problem, but it is to say that it is a problem with the state of the art where it is today.

The alternatives to bib chip timing have their downsides. FinishLynx systems can be very expensive and a bit labor intensive. They also require all runners to be wearing hip numbers. Shoe chips have reduced variability in detection when compared to bib chips, but there is still some variability.

Durden's timing company used shoe chips at the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference championship meet and the NCAA Division II Central Region meet, both in Denver, this fall. From that experience, he reports, "We had about six close finishes that we had to use video to call. One finish was too close to call even with the video, so we went with what the judges saw as the runners finished (which, incidentally, was the order the chips had the finish). In two finishes, the video reversed the chip order. Chip timing does give us a cleaner finish area, but it is not the perfect answer. Personally I doubt we will ever be able to just use chips for events like cross country where order of finish is vital. A marriage between FinishLynx and chips is the best we have at the moment."

One big advantage of using chips? It allows for split timing, and most people are willing to accept the variability inherent in chips for split times.