TECHNOLOGY & BIOMECHANICS

The swimming competition at the 10th FINA World Championships - BCN03 has been a world record event not only in terms of sporting success but also for the number of swimmers participating, spectators, the temporary 50m swimming pool constructed in Palau Sant Jordi, the number of countries who broadcasted the sporting action, and also the Competition Analysis. In respect to the competition analysis, a big technological advance has been made regarding the implementation as well as how the information is adapted to the Biomechanists needs. The presentation of the data has also been developed in order to facilitate the understanding for users. The following figure shows the technological protocol used. A special software has been developed to dramatically reduce (about 80%) the processing time. This therefore allowed swimmers and coaches to receive and study the technical results before the next races.

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A Local Network Area was set up with a Gb external gateway to Internet, which was provided by the Organizing Committee. The swimming pool was recorded using 4 ccd cameras located on the ceiling of the Palau Sant Jordi. A video capture workstation (Inthepoolgrab), designed by STT, was on charge to record the video signal, which was also synchronized with the Swiss Timing inputs (race starting signal and touch pad data). The video files were simultaneously processed on the Analysis Units with the Inthepool software. The reports were generated in a PDF format and uploaded, after a quality control verification, to the website of the organization http://www.e-plash.org and CAR's website http://www.car.edu/finabcn03/

Hereunder are some general statistics:

Some stats as general info could be:

• All swimmers at Palau Sant Jordi where digitally recorded
• 756 swimmers analyzed
• 15.500 m of swimming processed
• 0,6 Tb of Mass Storage
• 2400 Ghz of computing power with Personal Computers
• 250 Mb of Biomechanical Reports in PDF Format
• 1 km of Video cable