How are the results recorded in athletics?

Answer 1

This answer needed to be corrected. Recording Track and Field events is as scientific as is possible under the practical circumstances. For simple meets a field event might be recorded with a measuring tape, but when a record exists a minimum of a steel measuring tape (read by 3 certified officials) is required. At bigger meets they might also employ a laser/surveying system for speed. Vertical measurements are taken both before and after a record attempt.

For running events hand run stopwatches might be used at smaller meets but for record purposes (excepting some long distance events) Fully Automatic Time is required. Fully Automatic Time--FAT is a photo electric process (now using computers, though older systems did not) that starts the electronic clock with the sound of the gun. The time for a given athlete is measured by the time his body passes the finish line as seen through a narrow photographic image of the line taken by a camera. The older photographic system used Polaroid film moving the opposite direction to the runners and a vertical aperture (with a pulsing LED inside the camera for calibration). The current computer/video system takes up to 10,000 single vertical scan lines a second and assembles them side by side relative to the time. These pictures then must be read for the time to be determined.