Senior Project - White Gold

Cross Country skiing and biathlon are sports that present a significant challenge to coaches with respect to how to time their athletes and provide them with up-to-date information during a race. Athletes typically start at intervals of thirty seconds to one minute and race against the clock. At any given point in the race, there may be competitors on their first, second, or third lap. This makes it difficult to know where a competitor is relative to his competition. Some athletes could finish the race before others even begin, and thus it is difficult to determine who is leading, over whom, and by how much.

Software exists to assist coaches in timing their competitors, but much of it is considered unusable. Current software was either out of date, difficult to use, or ran on devices that are not easily portable. Thus, new software needed to be created to address these issues. The software needed to be developed for a PDA to provide portability and the user interface needed to be influenced by the coaches that will use the software during competition to insure suitability and ease of use.

John Ruger, Athlete Ombudsmen for the United States Olympic Committee, sponsored the project. The system provides facilities for downloading and manual entry of race information (racer names, bib numbers, countries, start times, etc.), tracking of racers throughout the duration of a race, and upload of results at the conclusion of a race. The project addresses the issues faced by previous Nordic timing systems, providing a graphical user interface with error recovery, while being very portable in the field. The software is deployed on a HP iPAQ.