On the closing day of the Tampere SC Skiing, the timing device broke during the women’s qualifying. Johanna Matintalo and Ristomatti Hakola had two types of winning times in the live results of the organizers and on the FIS website.
15:16•Updated 15:22
The SC sprints skied in Tampere on Sunday were marked by problems with timing. First, the women’s heats were delayed by half an hour, because the results of the qualifiers were not received in time.
Leader of the competition Pasi Rajala says that the problem was caused by a hardware fault.
– The device just didn’t forward data. I don’t think a similar situation has happened in skiing before, he says Esa Mikkonenwho was one of the people in charge of the results service.
Rajala says that there is always a backup device in use, with which the official results were finally obtained.
– There are two systems side by side. They work independently of each other. If one breaks, it doesn’t affect the other.
The device was switched between men’s and women’s qualifying.
– During the men’s qualifying, it was not possible to return the results in the reserve system to the main system. Because of this, it took half an hour extra time to transfer the data from the backup system to the main system and to the website.
Rajala says that the skiing public is used to following results from the live results service. He reminds that the live results are not the final results, however.
– The results are always confirmed as official by the judges’ council. If there are technical or human errors, the results are always checked.
The competition organizers received a lot of feedback on the matter.
– The most common feedback was that clearly wrong results were visible for a long time. There was not much feedback about moving the schedule.
– Now it so happened that all the athletes got half an hour extra recovery time for the heat stage, which no one complained about. The original competition schedule was exceptionally tight, says Rajala.
Different winning times
There were also special features in the final stage.
The winning times on the website of the International Ski Federation FIS and in the live results differed at least on Monday afternoon. For example, having won the women’s sprint Johanna Matintalo winning time on the FIS website 3:46.76, when in live results (you switch to another service) it was 12 hundredths better.
There were also differences in differences. In the live results, Matintalo and the runner-up Katri Lylynperän between them there was a difference of 12 hundredths, while in FIS’s result service there was a difference of 20 hundredths.
Mikkonen says that the times are more accurate in the finish camera.
– The results on the Internet are always unofficial before they are corrected. When the times are checked, they may change, says Mikkonen.
The problems were also visible in the TV broadcast. Immediately after crossing the finish line, the graphics claimed Lylynperä as the women’s winner and Men’s as the winner Joni Mäkea. In reality, the champions were Matintalo and Cross mat Hakola.