Owner of ALGE timing gives his perspective on the Schladming affair

Owner of ALGE timing gives his perspective on the Schladming affairSkiracing.com and Ski Racing magazine is continuing to investigate the recent controversy over timing problems at Schladming. In response to comments comments by Caroline Lalive posted at this website, Albert Vetter, who runs ALGE timing sent this letter to Ski Racing Magazine.

ALGE timing got a lot of bad press after the race in Schladming. We are for sure not happy about what happened in Schladming, but if you look closer at the problems we had you would think different. I would like to tell you first, that skiing is a live sport. If something goes wrong you have it live at TV, but the TV is not the official time. There are certain rules for how everybody has to do the timing and this was always granted in our case.

Concerning the problem in Soelden we had a controller from the FIS in the timing room. He got all the orginal timing impulses from start and the finish photocells on a separate timer of the FIS. The controller in the timing room was a FIS employee and the chairman of the timing working group. He checked the all times independent from us and approved it. What else can you ask for. Do you do not trust the FIS? Do you think the FIS would allow us to give to Ms. Lalive just any time? After all the problems between the OESV and the FIS we were checked very carefully, for sure more carefully than any other timing team was ever checked.

The problem in Schladming was completely different. We got “strange” impulses without reason from one photocell for racer 1, 2 and 3. For racer one we got a wrong impulse 0.5 seconds before the finish, for racer bib 2 we got an impulse 0.59 seconds before the finish arrival, and for racer with bib 3 we got it 4.3 seconds before the arrival. All correct impulses we had as well, but the first impulse goes to TV. It is impossible to see from the finish house if an impulse is 0.5 seconds too early. Since there was no reason to believe that this was a wrong impulse, we thought the second impulse is from snow spray. This is not unusual at such races with snowfall. Only when we compared the times from both photocells we could see that the first impulse was not on both photocells. Now we could also compare the time with the hand time and it matched also with the second impulse. We reported to the FIS-professional that we have to change the time of bib 1 and 2 and than it was out of our hands. Maybe you do also not know, that the protest of the Italian team was never against the time, it was against the procedure. In the mean time the responsible person of the FIS for timing checked all timing protocols and told me that we have correct times and agreed also with us that it was impossible to spot at the finish arrival.

Now we have still the question for the reason of the wrong finish impulses at the worst time for us. Can this be by coincidence? We checked the photocell after the race and it was perfect OK. It is also not normal to get a wrong impulse and 0.5 second later the photocell works OK when the racer passes the finish. We do not know the reason for the problem in Schladming, but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions for us.