Race day is over, you finally sit down with your event email, and there is one from a participant who is not showing up in the results. It happens at almost every race, with every timing company.
Chip timing is very good and very accurate, but it is not perfect. How chip timing works covers what the mats are reading as you cross the line. There are things you can do as the organizer, and things we do on the timing side, to cut down on missing results and to recover the ones that happen anyway.
The short versionMost missing times are not missed reads. They are a bib nobody could see, two friends who swapped bibs without telling anyone, or a runner who never crossed the mat. Equipment failure is rarer than any of those, and it is the one your timer should be hunting for rather than waiting to hear about.
The mat does not read you once
A chip is not scanned like a barcode at a single instant. From the moment you come into range until you are clear of the mat, the reader is catching your chip over and over. At a road race finish we typically see each runner read dozens of times, often between 50 and 200 times in the few seconds they are crossing.
Why a result actually goes missing
The bib was covered or shielded. The most common one we see. A bib folded in half, pinned through the chip itself, worn under a jacket on a cold morning, or tucked behind a hydration vest. We also see a lot of it from runners reaching an arm across their chest to stop a watch as they cross. The chip is on the bib, so whatever is in front of the bib is in front of the chip.
They never crossed the mat. Runners cut around the timing mat when the chute is crowded, step off the course and rejoin past a split, or start somewhere other than the start line. It is rarely deliberate and it produces exactly the same gap in the data.
The chip was damaged, or soaked. Chips get bent, torn off and pinned back on, and occasionally one is faulty from the start. Houston adds its own version of this: runners finish drenched in the heat and humidity, and water sitting between the chip and the mat pulls read rates down. We run wet inlay chips and double mats at the finish for exactly that reason. It is something you deal with here, and anywhere else humid, rather than something you fix.
Two friends swapped bibs. Or someone ran on an entry that was not theirs, picked up the wrong packet, or moved from the 10K to the 5K on race morning and told nobody. The chip read perfectly. It just reported the wrong person, or the wrong division.
They were never in the start list. A day-of registration that did not reach us, an entry added after we pulled the file, or someone running without registering at all. There is no record to attach a time to.
The equipment lost it. A failing antenna connection, a battery that collapses under load part way through the morning, a mat that gets knocked loose. Rare, and the only one of these that belongs to us rather than to race morning. That is where most of our attention goes.
At a well run race, everything above usually affects a small handful of participants, and most of it is recoverable. The goal is zero, and in practice we have systems in place to make sure every participant ends up with a result.
What we do about the part that is ours
Equipment failure is the one we can fix before your race rather than after it.
Every reader is graded after every eventWe read the logs off each unit after it runs and compare how often it caught athletes against the other readers at the same race that day. A reader that is starting to slip shows up in that comparison weeks before it would fail on a race morning, and it gets pulled for a bench check rather than sent back out.
We track each unit week to weekNot a pass or fail on the day, a history. Battery packs in particular fail slowly and invisibly: they read a healthy voltage at the start of every event and then collapse under load, and the only way to see it coming is to watch the same unit over weeks.
What happens on race day
More than one read point. Where your race has a start mat and splits as well as a finish, a runner leaves a trail rather than a single data point. Someone with a start read and no finish read is a very different problem from someone with no reads anywhere, and the difference tells us where to look.
Camera backup at the finish. Our Elite and Full Service packages include it. If the chip produced nothing, the finish is on video and the time comes off the footage. It is not included on Essential or Remote, so weigh that when you pick a package if a missing time would be a serious problem at your race.
Results are reviewed against the start list before they are final. This happens on every package, and it is the one that catches most of what the mats did not. We are looking for people who started and never finished, times that do not make sense, and anything else that does not reconcile against who was supposed to be out there.
Then we chase what is left. Anything that looks wrong gets tracked down and corrected rather than published and defended. Some of it needs you, because the answer lives with your volunteers or your packet pickup table rather than in our data.
The one trade-off with live results. When results post in real time, a swapped bib or a wrong division goes up exactly as it was entered, and the first person to spot it is usually the participant standing there with their phone. That is an easy fix on the day: send them to the timing tent and we will correct it on the spot. The same fix on Monday morning takes more steps, and by then it can affect award placements from race day.
What you can do before race day
Most of what goes wrong is not a technology problem, so most of the fix is not technical either. Four things move the number.
Tell people how to wear the bib. On the front, flat, unfolded, on the outside of everything. Put it in the pre-race email and say it at the start line. One sentence, and it prevents more missing times than anything else you can do.
Have a process for race morning changes. Distance changes and bib swaps are fine as long as somebody writes them down and gets them to the timer. Unrecorded, they turn into a missing result and an unhappy email a week later.
Get us the final start list, and tell us about late entries. Someone who is not in the file cannot appear in the results no matter how well the mats worked.
Make the finish line obvious. People go around mats when it is not clear where the line actually is. A few cones and a volunteer at the line fix most of that, and an inflatable finish arch removes the question altogether. We rent arches along with the rest of the finish line setup.
And when it happens anyway
Send them to us. All of our results pages carry a form a participant can fill in that comes straight to us, and every one of our packages includes email support for results questions. We would much rather answer those directly than have you spend your Monday forwarding them.
Point people at that form when you announce results, and most of this is resolved between us and the participant without ever reaching your inbox.
Common questions
Thinking about who times your race?We are happy to talk through how we handle the misses, and which package makes sense for the kind of race you are putting on.