A photo-finish strip shows you exactly when every runner crossed. It does not tell you who. In a lane heat that gap has a name: each crossing has to be tagged with a lane before it becomes a result, and deciding which lane a shape belongs to is the part of adjudication that actually takes time.
Meanwhile, someone at the finish already knows. The field judge calls the lanes across the line as they cross, out loud, in real time. Called finishing order is simply writing those calls down so the person marking the strip does not have to work out the same answer a second time.
The effect is that one job becomes two smaller jobs running in parallel: one operator supplies the order, the other supplies the times, and neither waits on the other.
What it changes, concretely
Without calls, marking a lane heat is a two-step loop for every runner: scrub to the crossing, then pick the lane it belongs to. Picking the lane is the expensive step, because it means reading the picture, or remembering the finish, or asking someone.
With calls recorded, the lane rail on the marking screen is already in the order the lanes crossed, and Mark walks along it by itself. The loop collapses to: scrub to the crossing, tap Mark. The lane is never chosen at all.
That is the whole feature. Everything below is how to work it and where it stops.
Who does what
Two positions, both of which already exist in a photo-finish crew.
| Position | Device | Job |
|---|---|---|
| Bib Collector | In the chute, near the judge | Taps each lane as it is called |
| Capture | The mounted camera | Marks the crossings on the strip |
This is a good fit for the Bib Collector precisely because a lane heat leaves that position with the least to do. Bibs were assigned to lanes before the gun, so there is often nothing to type. The calling pad gives that operator the job that is genuinely urgent while the race is running, and the bib work is still there afterward when it is not. See roles and responsibilities for how the two photo-finish sub-roles split.
The collector does not have to be a separate person from the judge. If the judge is holding the phone, they are calling and recording in one motion.
Recording the calls
On the Bib Collector, a lane heat opens on a Call order / Bibs segment, showing Call order. That is deliberate: the calls are what is outstanding at that moment.
The pad is one large button per lane, in lane order. Tap each lane as the judge calls it.
- A called lane fills in and picks up a badge with its position:
1st,2nd,3rd. - The buttons never move. The pad stays in lane order all the way through the heat, so your thumb can find lane 5 without looking at the screen.
- A lane already called does nothing when tapped again. A lane heat records one crossing per lane, so a second tap is a mis-hit, and treating it as one is the safe reading.
- The running sequence sits above the pad, most recent call at the right.
Two corrections are available:
- Undo last removes the most recent call. This is the one to reach for mid-heat, because it does not require reading anything.
- Clear starts the sequence over, behind a confirmation. Use it between heats, not during one.
Once the heat leaves timing and moves into recording, which is what your own Submit does, the pad goes read-only and the screen nudges over to Bibs. From that point the calls are a record of what happened, and a mistake in them gets fixed on the strip rather than here.
Do not chase a call you missed. A partial sequence still helps: the lanes that were called sort to the front of the rail and the rest follow in lane order, so you get the benefit for the part of the field you caught. Stopping to reconstruct a missed call while runners are still crossing costs more than it saves.
Marking with the calls
Nothing has to be turned on at the camera. When calls exist, the marking screen picks them up on its own.
- The lane rail sorts into the called order. Called lanes come first in the order they crossed, then anything uncalled by lane number.
- The rail heading reads
n/m Calledinstead ofn/m Lanes, which is how you know the buttons are no longer in lane sequence. - Each chip carries its call position, so the order is still readable after you have scrolled the rail.
- Mark auto-advances along the called order. Scrub to the first crossing, tap Mark, scrub to the next, tap Mark. Each mark lands on the lane the judge called for that position.
A lane picked by hand always wins. The calls order the rail and preselect the next lane; they never overrule a choice you made.
Re-tag, for a set marked out of sequence
Sometimes the marks go on in a different order than the runners finished: you adjudicated the tight finish at the front first, or a record keeper re-marked the strip from scratch after the meet. Every crossing is on the picture, but the lane tags are rotated against the times.
Re-tag fixes that in one move. It hands the Nth-earliest crossing the Nth called lane. The button only appears when it would actually change something, so if it is not there, the tags already agree with the calls.
What it does not do
- It never adds or removes a mark. Re-tag only shuffles the lanes among the crossings you already marked. The same set of lanes goes in and comes out.
- It does not resolve a real disagreement. If the judge called lanes 1, 2 and 3 but the strip was marked on 4, 5 and 6, the lanes the two have in common are reordered and the rest are left alone. Deciding who actually crossed is the operator's call, and the app will not guess it for you.
- It is not a source of times. A call records order, never a moment. Every time in the heat still comes off the strip.
- It does nothing in a pack heat. A pack has no lanes to call, and its crossings are already ordered by the times they were marked at. The pad does not appear.
- It is entirely optional. A heat with no calls recorded behaves exactly as it did before the feature existed: the rail is in lane order and you pick each lane yourself.
Where the calls survive to
The sequence is kept in three places, so it is still there when you need it later:
- On every device that saw it, including through an app relaunch mid-heat.
- With the record keeper, for a re-mark on their own device.
- With the strip itself, so a record keeper reviewing that strip days later gets the calls with it, long after the device that recorded them has left the meet.
Where it keeps the meet moving
The saving on a single heat is small. It adds up where heats come close together.
Sprints, where heats run back to back. A round of 100m heats is the tightest stretch on most schedules: small fields, short races, and the next heat at the line while the last one is still being read. Any one strip takes a moment to mark, but there are a lot of them in a row, and the camera is the one finish position that cannot work ahead of the track. Taking the lane-tagging step out of eight heats in a round adds up to more than taking it out of a single 3200m.
Marking that slips a heat behind does not announce itself. Nothing on screen looks wrong, and the usual first sign is a question from the record keeper about a heat two events back, where a lane that was never marked and a lane that has not been read yet look the same. Calls keep the marking inside the gap between heats, which is where it stays out of the schedule's way.
Any other lane heat. Anywhere the finish is close enough that reading lanes off the strip takes a second look.
A heat without calls costs nothing. It behaves exactly as it always has, so an operator needed elsewhere for one heat can leave the pad alone and pick it up on the next. There is nothing to switch on or off, and no state to reset between heats.
Recording on every lane heat, rather than only the close ones, is a practical matter of sequence. Whether a finish was close is known once it has happened, and the calls can only be recorded while it is happening.
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