TIME AND SPORT

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Why, how and since when has time made us run (and stirred us)?

Though the Olympic motto begins with “faster”, chance has nothing to do with it.

In the matter of sport, time is of the essence. Central. Crucial.

What is its exact function in sport? What role does it play?

Why does time bring up so many emotions?

This documentary recounts how sporting time flirts firstly with the gods and the elements; then how it engages the technological adventure and becomes, quantified to the thousandth of a second, an economic and social issue.

An adaptation of the temporary exhibition “Chasing time” from The Olympic Museum (2014), this digital time travel is yours.

Explore it below using your fingertips or your mouse.

Enjoy it. Share it. And take your time.

FOR ETERNITY

A marathon runner.
(Abebe Bikila – ETH, JO Tokyo 1964).
The finish line that emerges. And a time machine that got carried away.

TRAVELING THROUGH TIME

Since when has time
run after time?

For centuries, the measurement of time has been a preoccupation of mankind.

Initially, there was a human consciousness of a natural, cyclical time.

Thus, during prehistoric times and Antiquity, the perception became one that constituted points of temporal reference to mark the unchanging succession of the day and night, seasons, as well as opportunities to harvest and hunt.

CYCLICAL TIME

The Olympic Games guide the lives of the ancients and their dates are determined according to the lunar calendar.

Celebrated every four years, Olympiads therefore constitute chronological references known to all Greeks.

CHRONOS GOING IN A CIRCLE

In Greek mythology, time is central. Chronos (not to be confused with Cronos, father of the Titans) is both a symbol and a master of time.

Greeks represent him embracing Anaké, his wife, and goddess of fatality. Both of them encircle the world; they lead the eternal rotation of the celestial vault.

Leader of the world, time driven by Chronos allots its divine significance to temporalities.

Parallel to this, days, weeks, months and years began to be grasped in a more rational and precise way. Time measurement tools multiply. The tracking of the lunar rotation is most likely at the origin of the invention of calendars. In Ancient Greece, their usage spread, however time was not yet uniform. It remained compliant with social laws of civilisations in which cities are autonomous and possess their own calendar.

TIME OF THE OLYMPIADS

Nike presenting the olive wreath to the winner


In Olympia, the winner received a wild olive wreath. Greeks from Antiquity believed the gods decidef to grant an athlete victory.She is represented in the form of a female winged character, called Nike, “victory” in Greek. A modest leaf wreath is the highest award assigned in the Greek world as it guarantees the recipient honour and respect by all.

Apollo and Diana leading the chariots of the Sun and the Moon

Miniature of the Aratus of Winchester (UK), 1025-1049, Poem of Aratos of Soles constellations’ illustration, (315-245 BC) translated into Latin by Cicero.

THE TIME OF THE IMMORTALS

In Olympia, the lunar calendar determines the date of the Games, following the rhythm of natural forces and religious beliefs.

Time measurement does not exist in tournaments. The winner is he who arrives first.
It is the one chosen by Zeus who matters! Only first place and the number of trials won promote athletes to the rank of heroes, demigods.

This temporal ritual seeps into the time of civilian life, measured by the gnomon (the simplest of the solar clocks) or the clepsydra (water clock).
We notice here an antiquated ideology founded on the immortality of the divinities, time being created like a succession of cycles, where modern Games, with the establishment of time measurement, follow a linear time, the record meaning a limit that is always surpassable, connected to the ideology of technical and scientific progress of modern societies.

The Antikythera mechanism

Celebrated every four years, the Olympiads serve as a reference for all Greeks.

The Antikythera mechanism indicating the position of the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, is the most ancient proof of the Olympic Games’ calendar.

ST AUGUSTINE'S CONFESSIONS

“What then is time?
If no one asks me, I know:
if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not”

HARMONY

RAPHAEL ENTHOVEN, PHILOSOPHER

Olympic Museum, June 2014

LEAVING ON TIME

What are these sounds whistling over our heads?

Experience time through sound:

the muffled detonation of the starting pistol,

the trill of the referee's whistle,

the powerful vibration of the gong,

the ringing of a bell,

the sounds of steps or the grating of sand beneath one’s shoes,

the ear catches hints of competition time; from loud noises to the quiestest sounds.


1-2-3 go!

SOUNDS OF THE STADIUM

London, 1908. Whistle used by James Dallas, British gymnastics judge.

London, 2012. Bell used in athletics events to signal the start of the last lap.

Moscow, 1980

1950s. Referee's whistle

London, 1908. Whistle used by James Dallas, British gymnastics judge.

THE START

THE KEY MOMENT

When the athlete launches towards his goal and where the action begins.

THE DETONATION

The Olympic Legend

Does time have a sound? And what does this sound provide us with? A whistle, a shot of a revolver, a bell… What do they tell us? Sounds of childhood, sounds of a lifetime.

The Digital Era

Revolution at the Vancouver Games (2010). The legendary gun is replaced by a radical-looking pistol, equipped with a flash and a sound generator.

FINAL ATTEMPT

Montreal, 1976.

STOPPING TIME

How has time become a social issue?

It was at the turn of the 18th century that the link to time witnessed a revolution.

Thanks to the mechanics’ joint efforts, the start of miniaturisation and industrialisation, stopwatches and chronometers were produced, then widely distributed throughout the privileged classes of Europe.

Time became a social measure. And athletics would seize this opportunity.

Find out how.

TOWARDS MODERN SPORT

The middle of the 19th century constituted a pivotal moment:
the early industrialisation of England and the search for increased worker productivity set an imperative to rationalise the movements explored by Étienne-Jules Marey, doctor and professor at "Collège de France", and Georges Demenÿ, his assistant.

Together, Marey and Demenÿ developed the physiology of movement. Their inventions would make it possible to visually break down human and animal movement, while recording the duration of this movement.

Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer and contemporary of Marey, also tried to comprehend movement through the image.

Their chronophotography work was already used in various areas and put hitherto unimagined postures and sequences of movements on the agenda. This would have an indirect influence on sport and the rationalisation of work.

Through positivist logic, Demenÿ developed a gymnastic method aiming to rationalise movements and save energy consumption in order to prepare young people for “industrial fatigue”.

In modern sports, this link is expressed by the seeking record performances and motor improvements.

During the same period, English romanticism offered stories of “pedestrians”, joggers and walkers who travelled the British countryside while recording the miles and hours of their journey.

Little by little, books compiled these stories, of incredible facts, then resonating among gazettes. We measure, then we record in a written document: “to record” in English, which comes from old French, “to learn by heart”.

The idea of the sports record was born. And with it, modern sport, and its search for performance.

CHRONOTOGRAPHY FILM OF ETIENNE JULES MAREY, 1892.

In the 19th century, sport embodied a new connection to time, to productivity, and to the efficiencies of movements.

SPLIT-SECOND OLYMPIC CHRONOGRAPH, ACCURATE TO THE NEAREST 1/10TH OF A SECOND, 1930

The split-second chronograph had an additional needle compared to the classic chronograph, superimposed on the second hand.

This needle measured two events beginning simultaneously without the same duration (such as running).

THE FIRST TIMES MEASURED

The origin of time measurement in sport goes back to horse races. Importance is given to the distance covered in the best possible time rather than the time itself. Here, a horse race in Cheltenham, 1826, at an English School.

Students of Exeter College, Oxford initiated the usage of timing in the middle of the 19th century, which they recorded in their register.

Register of indexed times of races, 4 and 5 November 1878. Exeter College, Oxford (England). The first record of the 100 metres was made in 1864.

The victorious Birmingham team during a national tournament in Liverpool, engraving.

The origin of time measurement in sport goes back to horse races. Importance is given to the distance covered in the best possible time rather than the time itself. Here, a horse race in Cheltenham, 1826, at an English School.

CHEATING TIME

And what if time, in the end, is only a relative concept?

Man plays with time, as time plays with us.

It is a race against time, between time and us; and between us and us.

In sport, the master of time is called ethics. And its weapon, the photo-finish.

Become an expert in the thousandth of a second.

CHEATING TIME

A record, even if it is exceptional, is an agreement of the strict norms it respects.

The record is also a social construction: depending on how it is revealed and broadcast, it will impact individuals differently. Time is at once rigid and fluid.

MISCONDUCT & DOPING

Sacrificing one’s body to beat a record. It is the curse of doping that affects every discipline.

OBSESSION

Before modern sport, records meant nothing.
With the acceleration of time since the middle of the 20th century, the record has become everything, to the point of obsession.

THE BEST TIME AT ANY COST

Athletes are chasing time to get faster.
Scientific progress makes the measurement of time more precise and time and motion studies and medical science contribute to healthy peak performances, but it is not all good news.

Athletes do not just beat time some of them try to cheat time and take drugs to enhance their performance as well as to cure injuries.
The more important it becomes to be faster, higher and stronger, the more likely it is that trainers and athletes will use whatever resources are available to them to improve their performance.

These drugs are not only illegal, they can be very damaging to athletes and take their toll on athletes' bodies and even life expectancy.

ETHICS OF TIME

OR ABSOLUTE PROHIBITION: THE MANIPULATION OF TIME

Jean-Pierre Bovay is one of the pioneers who, from the 1960s, laid the groundwork for an evolution that has led to today’s photofinishing techniques. The researcher, formerly toof Omega horology, is at the origin ofbehind the idea of “ethical time”.

THE UNSTOPPABLE PHOTO-FINISH CAMERA

A camera placed alongside the finish line, the photo-finish camera does not photograph a perspective, but what happens on the finish line itself, through a permanently open slit that registers all the events occurring at this line.

THE PHOTOFINISH, A 20TH CENTURY STORY

Developed in the 1950s, the photo-finish responds to the idea of ethical time held dear to Jean-Pierre Bovay.
Therefore, the objective of time would be protected from any kind of manipulation, and athletes from the human error related to manual timing.

While the use of photofinishing is prominent today, it was not always the case.
Until the 1980s, photofinishing was very much contested by some.

Everything began in 1912, during the Olympic Games of Stockholm, where semi-automatic timing system was used. The chronographs were placed at the finish line, each of them controlled by an electromagnetic circuit.

At the start, the pistol gave the electromagnetic circuit the order to trigger every chronograph simultaneously, by means of an electrical contact placed inside the pistol.

At the finish line, chronographs were stopped separately by remote controls assigned to judges.
Apart from the chronograph, the control of the lead judge activated a camera that took an instantaneous photograph.
The photograph corresponded of the precise moment, that the main judge had pushed the button of his chronograph, i.e. the time to the first place athlete.

This system was of great service, especially for deciding between the second and third place athletes in 1500 metres.

It was in 1932, during the Los Angeles Olympic Games, when Gustavus T. Kirby made a huge step in high precision. Kirby, an athletics fan, was the creator of the famous “Two-Eyed Camera”, thus named because it had one eye on the finish line and another on a chronometer.

This camera shot at a speed of 128 images per second. It played a decisive role in the men’s 100-metre final, and the recording of the race later led to a modification to the rules concerning the finish line.
Metcalfe, whom some saw as the winner, was declared second. He crossed the finish line practically at the same time as Tolan, but he lost by five hundredths of a second. The rules in place at the time declared in favour of the man whose torso had crossed the line fully. In this case it was Tolan.

In 1946, Del Riccio was one of the designers of the “Racend Omega”. This was the first camera with a slit to be used at the Olympic Games, notably in London in 1948. During the 1952 Olympic Games, a quartz chronometer known as the “Racend Omega Timer” was incorporated.

Despite the addition of a quartz chronometer, that allowed for the photo-finish to reach an exact precision that had previously never been seen, in athletics, they continued to measure performances manually and individually.

The “Racend Omega Timer” was used during the Melbourne and Rome Games, where, in the 400 metres, it served as the judge-referee for the fantastic Davis-Kaufmann duel.

Whenever the human eye was unable to decide between two competitors, they willingly resorted to the photo-finish, yet were not so inclined to ask for the times.

Scientists were not impressed by the manual chronometer’s reputation, for they knew that this timekeeping was sometimes a fool’s game.
In some cases, an athlete might be rewarded by a strong performance, but simply at the expense of someone else.

Aware of this issue, the heads of athletics decided to move forward with the automation of timekeeping in 1968 at Mexico City’s Olympic Games. They were the first Games to be 100 per cent electronically controlled, and never were so many world records broken(around 10 in the running races)…

This astonishing series of records hugely impacted the media (which broadcast photo-finishes around the world), and the system was thus finally affirmed as the only judge.

In 1990, the first entirely electronic photo-finish system was commercialised by OMEGA Electronics. Its huge advantage was to remove the development time of film, which saved nearly three minutes in publishing the official results of each race.

Currently, every photo-finish system is electronic and controlled by computers. Its resolution, acquisition speed and sensitivity to light continue to improve.

MISLED BY TIME

The sports performance is both private and public.
At the centre of a full stadium or in front of cameras from around the world, the athlete must refocus in order to give himself a moment of solitude and privacy.
As if time should not have a hold on him.

WHAT IS A RECORD?

Can we imagine sport without the notion of a record?
At first glance, the race against time seems inseparable from the quest for sporting excellence.

Does beating a record involve being the fastest athlete?
The best in the world? In one’s country?
Is it a record when we break our personal record?

Moreover, is a record time a definitive time or is it influenced by factors that help man in his victory?
How can the evolution of training and materials contribute to the race for records, to be “ever faster, ever higher…”?

In athletics, every distance is travelled in terms that allow for an exact comparison, over time. It is an athlete who runs against time with his power, his resistance and his reflexes.
It is man against the chronometer.

However, the possession of a record is a short-lived notion, we sometimes experience it for only a few minutes…
In some winter sports, while it is possible to compare the best times of a season to another, it is impossible to establish an absolute record.

Indeed, the route of the race, snow conditions, speed of the wind and visibility do not allow for a chronometric comparison for us to select the fastest athlete of all time in a particular discipline.

In the end, isn’t the record a relative notion?

UELI STECK, EXTREME CLIMBER AND MASTER OF SPEED CLIMBING

“I understood that I wanted to be faster than the others, it is something that fascinates and encourages me. It makes sense to me but we could easily doubt it.”
Ueli Steck

THE ILLUSION OF MOVEMENT

Raphaël Enthoven, philosopher

Olympic Museum, June 2014

AFTER DOING YOUR TIME

Run against time, but for what purpose? And for what glory?

Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis, Usain Bolt, Roger Bannister have risen to record levels and beaten records.

They made time into a dream, a trained matter, tamed.

Modern heroes who did their time, and moreover, made their mark on it.

BANNISTER

On 6 May 1954, Englishman Roger Bannister made history by becoming the first athlete to run a mile (1,609.34 metres) in less than four minutes (3’59.4).
The event was so exceptional that deputies from the House of Commons interrupted their session.

WHAT IS MAN’S QUEST IN THE RACE FOR TIME?

Is it a battle with his fellow human being?
Is it self-confrontation?
With the Titans?
And what if it was the ultimate duel against eternity?

100 METRES IN 10’3’’: JESSE OWENS, OLYMPIC GAMES, 1936, BERLIN

“A lifetime of training for just ten seconds”

Jesse Owens (USA)

100 METRES IN 9’86’’: CARL LEWIS, WORLD ATHLETICS CHAMPIONSHIPS, 1991, TOKYO

Owens, Lewis, Bolt, three legends, three eras.
To be able to compare, a record must always be replaced with the era that witnessed its birth.

100 METRES IN 9’58’’: USAIN BOLT, WORLD ATHLETICS CHAMPIONSHIPS, 2009, BERLIN

« I’ve learned over the years that if you start thinking about the race, it stresses you out a little bit. I just try to relax and think about video games, what I'm gonna do after the race, what I'm gonna do just to chill. »
Usain Bolt (JAM)

THE IMPROVEMENT

Raphael Enthoven, philosopher

Olympic Museum, June 2014

A different time for each sport. Could you define them?

Time is not the same for everyone. Depending on the sport, its place is not the same.

Three categories must be distinguished:
1: sports that follow a chronologic time, neither fixed nor limited, like a marathon;

2: those whose times are divided and limited, like football or hockey; and finally,

3: sports which, like tennis, present a divided time, but not limited. Indeed, a match can last for hours.

THE ARROW OF TIME

LIMITED SPORTS

In some sports, time dictates the rules and reigns as a master of actions.
Monolithic, unchanging, rigorous, thus time fascinates and imposes its presence, like an imperious god.

UNLIMITED SPORTS

In other sports, time is not the decisive criterion.
In this way, seconds and hours can draw out, opening potentially unlimited territories.

BEATING TIME

And what if time was our collective memory?

Ode to the athletes who challenged the restrictions of time and transcended its limits.

Defeating time has two meanings:

It is about winning and establishing a record and it is also about entering a collective memory like an ancient hero, it is about becoming immortal.

Like every human being, the athlete has to face this double requirement:

run after time and stop time’s race.

COLLECTIVE MEMORY

When spectators watch a tournament, they are pulled into the intensity of the PRESENT.
However, this “present time” is a matter of the past and the future; the show highlights both the past ancient records and the promises of new performances.

THE WAIT

Waiting for the countdown, the concentrated athlete. Around him, about the world slips away: sometimes insignificant details become distinct and clear, sometimes external sounds disappear. His breathing and pulse throb to this dilated time: until deep in his core, he is ready.

BEYOND TIME

THE CORRECT MOVEMENT

Raphael Enthoven, philosopher

Olympic Museum, June 2014

CREDITS

This web documentary is an adaptation of the temporary exposition “Chasing time” of the Olympic Museum (2014)

Copyright of the images in order of appearance in the chapter:

TIME AND SPORT: CIO

TRAVELING THROUGH TIME:
CIO Museo astronomico, Roma ©Costa/Leemage ; CIO (1) ©British Library Board/Robana/Leemage; © National Archaeological Museum, Athens (Kostas Xenikakis); ©Electa/Leemage

LEAVING ON TIME: CIO (5); Getty; CIO (1)

STOPPING TIME:
IOC (1) © Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museums, Gloucestershire, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library; Chancellor and students of Exeter University, Oxford (2 manuscripts); © Look and Learn;

CHEATING TIME: IOC (3) Getty; IOC (2)

AFTER DOING YOUR TIME: IOC (1)

HAVING JUST ONE TIME: IOC

BEATING TIME: IOC (2)

Coordination : Cultural & Educational Programmes Unit of The Olympic Museum.

Kramer

Wow! You're about to dethrone Dutchman Sven Kramer, the men's world 5,000m speed skating champion (6 minutes and 3.32 seconds in Calgary, in November 2007).

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