Faster, Higher, Stronger

Of the Olympics motto of 'Citius, Altius Fortius', the last two -- higher, stronger-- are not too difficult to measure. It's the first, 'faster', that poses the biggest problems.

Take Michael Phelps. Going for his seventh gold, in the 100 metres butterfly event, the elongated American realised that it was time for a big stroke of genus. A yard from finish, Serbia's Milorad Cavic was clearly ahead and set to end Phelps's dream. Then, Phelps lunged with a swiftness that baffled the eye-- it seemed that he and Cavic both hit the touch pad at the same time. Cavic, perhaps confident that he was going to get gold, had simply glided in, while Phelps charged.

"When I chopped that last stroke I thought I would be behind Cavic. I had to take my goggles off to see whether myname's against the No 1," Phelps said. "That was too close. But if you keep focused I think anything is possible."

To the naked eye, it was not possible to separate the two without causing an ugly disagreement. Only technology could deliver a result, backed by evidence that could stem controversy.

I experienced this technology at the pavilion of Omega -- the timekeepers of the Games since 1932-- at the Olympics Green. The starting block, with the pressure of feet of the swimmer at take-off, activates the timer for each swimmer. The "touch pads" at each end of the pool let the swimmers stop their own time themselves.

The touch pad, made of a stainless steel frame, has several PVC vertical slats; it is activated by the swimmer's touch but remains unaffected by the waves. It requires 3kg pressure to be activated. In the event, it seems that the mechanism failed to detect whether Cavic touched first or Phelps, perhaps because the Serb touched softly.

The result, thus, was decided by a photofinish camera that takes over 2000 high resolution images each second. This decisively established that Phelps won by the hundredth of a second.

Around 420 tonnes of timing and scoring equipment was used at the Beijing Games; around 450 technicians and engineers, apart from 1,000 volunteers, were used to ensure that the results were always right.

Indeed, several partners of the Games were competing in their own Tech Olympics, with zero margin of error. Lenovo, for instance, deployed some 30,000 pieces of equipment, including notebook and desktop PCs, flat-panel displays, touch-screen displays, printers and servers. This legion of hardware was deployed at 56 venues across seven cities and managed virtually every aspect of the Games, from gathering and storing data to displaying the scores.

"We'd been preparing for this for a year," a Lenovo spokesperson, Andrew Barron, toldOutlook. "We'd been creating, building and testing our systems. Thus, we were highly confident of going through the Games without a problem."

Barron is proud to note that when on August 10, heavy thunderstorms brought traffic to a halt in the city, the Games' outdoor competitions went on, enabled by equipment from his company.

Nearly six hundred Lenovo engineers worked on the whole Olympics project; several of the company's employees, mostly engineers, put off their marriages as they worked on the project. This, though, was a personal cost they were not unhappy to pay, for they delivered at the grandest Olympics of them all.