Sporting innovations

In the pursuit of greater timing accuracy, the VII Olympic Winter Games saw significant advances in timekeeping. The results of the cross-country skiing events were accurate to one hundredth of a second, setting a timekeeping standard that international sport federations decided to meet at major international competitions in the future. Timekeeping has evolved further since then. At Rio 2016, official Games timekeeper Omega unveiled a photo-finish camera that can take 10,000 digital images a second, while its Quantum Timer, which debuted at London 2012, has an enhanced resolution of one millionth of a second and is 100 times more accurate than previous devices.

Another timing-related innovation was the use of starting gates in the Alpine skiing competitions, which had previously relied on judges using two synchronised stopwatches, one at the start and one at the finish. These new gates made use of a buzzer sound and an optical signal similar to a traffic light to trigger the official start time automatically. Following their successful introduction at Cortina d’Ampezzo 1956, they have been used at every Olympic Winter Games since.

There were also developments in broadcasting. Cortina d’Ampezzo 1956 was the first Olympic Winter Games to be broadcast live, in black and white, to a multinational audience. Coverage was provided by Italy’s state broadcaster, RAI, and transmitted through Eurovision (now part of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU)) to eight European countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and West Germany. In an effort to bring the excitement of the Games to people in their homes, RAI stationed four cameras at different points along the bobsleigh track, allowing viewers to follow the athletes virtually all the way around. Television coverage of the Olympic Games has now become truly instantaneous and wide-reaching with Beijing 2022 watched by a global audience of 2.01 billion.

In the sporting arena, ski jumping moved into a new era with the advent of an innovative aerodynamic style – the so-called “Dascher technique”. Developed by Swiss jumper Andreas Dascher in the early 1950s, it involved keeping the body straight and the skis parallel, leaning as far forward towards the tips of the skis as possible, and holding the arms by the side of the body. Breaking away from the Norwegian tradition of bending the upper body and stretching the arms out in a diving position, the Dascher technique enabled athletes to jump further. Finnish ski jumpers Antti Hyvarinen and Aulis Kallakorpi adopted it to great effect in the one and only ski jumping competition at Cortina d’Ampezzo 1956, the normal hill, winning gold and silver respectively. Today’s ski jumpers use the V style pioneered by Swedish ski jumper Jan Bokloev in the mid-1980s, with the Dascher technique falling out of favour in the early 1990s.