FinishLine was built for track and field, and that is what it has been run at. But almost nothing in it is actually locked to track: event names are free text you type, and the parts underneath handle a field of competitors, a start, and a finish.
So the question of whether it fits your event has a real answer rather than a marketing one. It comes down to four tests, and in practice the first one settles most cases on its own.
The four tests
1. Every competitor in a heat starts at the same instant. Every result is the finish measured from one gun. There is one gun per heat, and a single shared start instant is what makes times captured on six different phones comparable to each other. See how clock sync works.
2. The result is elapsed time. There is no mark, distance, height, or judged score anywhere in the app. A result is a time and a place.
3. The field is either laned or an unlaned pack. A laned heat assigns a competitor to each lane, up to 12 of them. A pack heat has no lanes and no limit on the number of finishers. See collecting bibs in lane heats vs. pack heats.
4. The finish is a line competitors cross. This one matters only if you want photo finish, which images a line and reads the crossings off it. Without it, a person tapping as each competitor finishes works anywhere.
The start is what usually decides it
Test 1 is the one that rules events out, and it maps onto a distinction the racing world already has a name for.
Gun time starts everybody's clock at the same moment. Net time, also called chip time, starts each competitor's clock when they personally cross the start line, usually over a timing mat. FinishLine produces gun time. There is nowhere in the app for a per-runner start to live, and it does not connect to external timing hardware, so no chip, mat, or reader can supply one. See do I need timing hardware.
That single line explains most of the answers below. It is also why two events that look similar can land on opposite sides:
| These share one gun | These start competitors individually |
|---|---|
| Cross country | A big-city 5k or marathon with corrals |
| A rowing sprint regatta | A rowing head race, crews off at 15-second intervals |
| Mass-start nordic skiing | Interval-start nordic skiing |
| A BMX gate, dropping for all eight riders at once | A road-race start mat, stamping each rider separately |
An individually started event is not automatically out. It can be run as one heat per competitor, each with its own gun, and a single-lane heat is allowed. That works when competitors go one at a time, so each finishes before the next starts: a track kilo, a short prologue, a small hill climb with generous intervals.
It does not work when several are on course together, because the finish side tracks one heat at a time. See heats running at the same time.
What fits
Nothing in this table has been run at a real meet in that sport. It is what the app's model supports, which is a good guide and not a promise.
| Event | Fit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Track and field, running events | Built for it | The throws and jumps are not timed, so they are not recorded here |
| Cross country | Strong | One gun from a line or arc, gun time for everyone. Where an XC meet uses chips, they are read at the finish, not the start |
| Swimming | Likely | Laned, heated, age-grouped, purely timed. Photo finish does not apply: a swim finish is a hand on a wall, not a line crossed. Use a timer per lane |
| Open-water swimming | Likely | Structurally the same as cross country |
| Rowing and paddling sprints | Likely | Six to nine buoyed lanes, all crews away together, decided on time. Head races are the opposite and do not fit |
| BMX racing | Likely | Up to eight riders, the gate drops for all of them at once, tracks are built for eight lanes, finish is a line |
| Four-cross and dual slalom | Likely | Two to four riders, gate start, finish line. The same shape as BMX |
| Mass-start mountain bike cross-country | Workable | One gun and a pack. Laps are the operator's problem, not the app's |
| Criterium | Workable for the finish | One gun and a mass start, so the finish order captures cleanly. The lap and points scoring around it does not. See below |
| Mass-start road race | Workable | Watch the duration ceiling below |
| Small local road races | Often workable | Start mats cost money and plenty of races skip them. Without one, everybody's clock starts at the gun and chip time simply is gun time |
| Nordic skiing, mass start | Likely | Interval-start races do not fit |
| Indoor rowing and erg races | Likely | Machines are the lanes, one start command, purely timed |
| Speed climbing | Possible | Two lanes, shared start, timed. Like swimming, the finish is a touch rather than a line, so photo finish is out |
| Cycling time trial, hill climb, downhill | Only one at a time | Each competitor is their own heat. Fine for a kilo or a short prologue where one finishes before the next starts. A standard time trial puts twenty or more on course together, which the finish side cannot track |
Criteriums, specifically
A criterium passes the only structural test that matters: it is a mass start on one gun. The finish is a pack heat doing exactly what it is built for, with an operator tapping each rider on their final crossing and a second person attaching bibs afterward. That is the finishing order, captured the same way a finish judge calls placings today.
What the app does not do is the scoring layer around it: lap counts, who is a lap down, riders pulled and placed by laps down, points, and primes. Those stay with the officials. FinishLine can be the finish-line capture at a crit rather than the race-scoring system.
What does not fit
- Measured results. The throws, the jumps, weightlifting. Every result here is a time, so there is nowhere for a mark to go, and this holds at a track meet too.
- Judged results. Gymnastics, diving, figure skating, cheer.
- Individual start times. Chip-timed road races with corrals, rowing head races, alpine skiing. Cycling time trials belong here too at any real field size, for the reason below rather than for the staggered start itself.
- Scoring by laps or points. Track cycling points, scratch and elimination races, madison, keirin. The winner there is not the fastest clock.
- Multi-segment races. Triathlon, biathlon, enduro. Each is an aggregate of separately timed sections with transitions between them, and a result here is one time from one start.
Practical ceilings
These are real constraints rather than absolute ones, and worth knowing before you plan around them.
Heats running at the same time
More than one heat can be running at once and the app will not object, but the finish side is built around one heat at a time, and that is the real ceiling.
A finish device holds a single heat. There is no picker anywhere: it follows whichever heat's roster arrived most recently, and a device joining cold takes the most recently written one. Tapping Ready binds the device to its heat so a second cannot pull the screen away, and that second heat then waits in a one-deep queue to be joined once the current result is recorded. A third overwrites the second while it waits.
Photo finish does not have even that. A second gun while a capture is open flushes the first and takes the camera.
So two heats running at once is the working ceiling, and one is the comfortable number. This is enough for the case it was built for, a distance race still on the track while a sprint goes off. It is not enough for a format where competitors are released at intervals and are all on course together: twenty riders in a time trial means twenty running heats.
Why this matters more than it looks. A captured time is stamped with whatever heat that device is currently showing. A crew that loses track of which heat is on their screen does not get an error, they get results filed under the wrong heat.
Heat duration
A heat that has been running a long time is treated as one that cannot still be running, and is retired:
| Event type | Retired after |
|---|---|
| Sprint, relay | 30 minutes |
| Distance | 60 minutes |
| Unknown | 60 minutes |
This is applied when a device restores or reconnects, not continuously, so a session where every device stays up is unaffected. But any device that restarts or rejoins mid-race treats an older heat as finished. The unknown case is the common one, because a finish device often holds no meet config to resolve the event type from, so 60 minutes is the figure that applies in practice.
A 30 to 40 minute criterium is comfortable. A 90 minute one, or a two-hour road race, is not. The values are deliberately generous rather than tight, and they are a setting to raise rather than a limit in the design, so tell us if your event needs longer.
Laps
There is no lap concept anywhere in the app, which cuts two ways. A person tapping only the final crossing does not need one, so lap-based races are fine to time by hand. Photo finish is worse off: the strip shows every crossing, including riders being lapped, so the operator has to know which crossing is the finish. And there are no per-lap splits.
Shared finishing times
Road cycling conventionally gives a whole group the same time. The app records a distinct time per crossing and has nothing that assigns one time to a group of finishers.
Getting results out
The export formats are track-shaped: a general CSV, Athletic.net and MileSplit, and USATF Junior Olympic. There is no Hy-Tek HY3 or SDIF, so nothing hands off directly to swim meet-management software. You can also define your own column layout, which covers a league that just wants a spreadsheet.
The vocabulary stays track's
Events carry a Sprint, Distance, or Relay label, and the app talks about runners and lanes throughout. Nothing breaks, but it will not call your competitors what you call them.
If you are considering one of these
None of the sports on this page beyond track have been run at a real meet on FinishLine. Everything here is what the model supports, worked out from how the app is built, and the gap between that and a season of real use is exactly the gap worth being honest about.
If you are thinking about it, tell us at support@finishlinetimer.com before you plan a meet around it. What people actually ask for is what gets built.
Did this answer your question? If something here is wrong, missing, or out of date, tell us at support@finishlinetimer.com and we’ll fix it.