A new season is upon us, starting with last night’s Comeback 5000 at Battersea Park.
In response to increasingly fast times being set, World Athletics is expected to announce shortly that shoe declarations will be compulsory at all high level meetings this summer. OpenTrack’s entry and competition management system is ready to support you!
The entry system now has an extra optional “shoe declaration” step. This can be set to ask which shoe models entrants are wearing (see illustration), and to warn of models the meeting organiser is permitting
Meeting organisers can then set restrictions and use this in many ways, to set their own meeting-based policies:
- Results display: “spring” icons can be set to appear next to runners names
- Prize Categories: filter by shoe category, offering medals or prizes for “best traditional footwear”
- Staggered starts with barefoot in the first wave etc
Jon Ridgeon, World Athletics CEO, said last night at Battersea Park “These new innovations will help ensure the right combination of a level playing field, freedom of choice for individuals and meeting managers, and potentially a great opportunity for shoe companies and sponsors - just imagine the Dunlop Green Flash mile, or the Elastoplast barefoot Trophy”
Mirko Jalava of Tilastopaja in Finland says “With all this new data and our huge database we’re working on a system of Shoe Grades - similar to Age Grades - so that by late season, we can adjust your time to correct for footwear.”
Shoe Factors will be announced at the end of each season at the AthTech conference, and the results will hopefully be used to set official time penalties for the next season