Good article about the timing technology used at the Olympics.

The cameras used in track and field are the most sensitive. The extremely fast cameras, which take 1,000 images per second, shoot only the first 8 millimeters of the finish line. As the runners cross, the cameras capture their bodies in a series of thousands of minuscule bits, first photographing the tip of the toe, then the finger, then the tip of the nose, with resolution so fine it can pick up the hair on runners\’ bodies.

All those thousands of pictures are then electronically pieced together to reproduce a photo finish. That\’s why the runners\’ bodies look distorted in official finish line recordings — because the picture is not an actual picture but a visual re-creation of matter crossing a point in time.

[ From Kottke.org ]