We work on an occasional consulting basis with the B.A.A., organizers of the Boston Marathon. The 114th running of that venerable race happened on Monday, April 19th. Quite a bit has changed in the operation of a major marathon since 1897, and Network World produced this report on how the B.A.A.’s other technology partners handle the information stream created by ~25,000 runners (23,176 starters and 22,678 finishers according to the B.A.A.) who, despite participating in one of the world’s oldest and simplest sports, have since the mid-1990s been accompanied by RFID chips.
If you’re curious about transponder-based timing technology, I wrote an article for New England Runner in late 2008 which, while already obsolete in terms of the current state of the art, pretty much captured things at the time. The video above was brought to our attention by Josh Merlis of Albany Running Exchange, whose event production team does some pretty nifty stuff with transponder data, PHP, and occasional peripherals like on-course digital cameras.