The TCS New York City Marathon is the premier event of New York Road Runners (NYRR) — and the largest marathon in the world.
ChronoTrack has timed the New York City Marathon since 2009, and recorded the times of 51,388 finishers this year, a new record for the marathon.
More than 1,000,000 people have finished the race since its first running in 1970 with just 127 entrants and 55 finishers running four laps around Central Park. Held annually on the first Sunday of November, the race features over 50,000 runners including the world’s top professional athletes and a vast range of competitive, recreational, and charity runners.
The race expanded to all five boroughs in 1976 and just celebrated its 40th year as a five-borough affair. Participants from over 125 countries tour the city, starting on Staten Island at the foot of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and running through the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx before ending in Manhattan.
More than one million spectators and thousands of volunteers line the city streets in support of the runners, while millions more watch the television broadcast in 175 countries and territories.
Part of the Abbott World Marathon Majors, the race features the world’s top marathons—Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, and New York—and crowns the top professional male and female marathoners each year. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), a global IT services, consulting, and business solutions organization, is the premier partner of NYRR and the title sponsor of the TCS New York City Marathon.
The 47th running of the TCS New York City Marathon is set for November 5, 2017.
To accurately record the times of so many runners, ChronoTrack used state-of-the-art RFID technology in partnership with New York Road Runners (NYRR), 56 timers, 18 ChronoTrack staff, and 17 ChronoTrack partner timing companies. The timing systems were set up and ready to go in less than four hours, with 105 ChronoTrack controllers dispersed along the course. 52 timing points, including one at every mile, 5K, and the half-marathon point, to name a few, were used to collect more than seven million unique tag observations with a 99.98% accuracy rate.
ChronoTrack supports 25 of the 30 largest races in the U.S. Its comprehensive solution offers events a modular approach to accessing registration, on-site registration, race check in, scoring, live results, mobile results, athlete updates, on-site results, athlete photography and video finishes. This, coupled with its timing equipment and services from ChronoTrack’s network of certified timing partners provides the most complete race management solution for races in the market.
“Timing the TCS New York City Marathon is always an invigorating task,” explained Nick Weigand, Product Manager at ChronoTrack, “Being on the ground with more than 50,000 runners reminds us why we do what we do.”
