Following on from the inaugural Tour in 2004, we were again asked to provide the photofinish in 2005. I don't propose to replicate all the pictures from the 2004 event, many of which would be almost identical, but instead concentrate on the changes to the race. Also outlined are the (many) problems encountered!

I have interspersed this text with a few pictures from the Nottingham stage. It was the best location of the entire race and the local council really went to town on setting up some great attractions for the kids. Further on, I have included separate images from the Birmingham timetrial which show the timing setup.

Instead of being the Tour of England and Wales, this race was the Tour of England and Scotland! Maybe one day it will include all parts of Britain.

With a start in Glasgow, and stage finishes at Castle Douglas, Blackpool, Sheffield, Nottingham, Birmingham and Westminster, the Tour included some new areas as well as three towns from last year.

Unfortunately I had to join the race in Glasgow the day before, which was something of a pointless excercise as the only thing for me to do there was to collect my accreditation and clothing. The latter was bit of a non-starter as all I got were two T-shirts. Still, a night in the Hilton was some compensation. The Tour organisation usually books into decent hotels which are welcome after a day on the race.

The first picture (above) shows the hospitality unit which was one of the impressive corporate vehicles engaged on the Tour this year. Many of them were brought over specially from Holland.

Last year's difficulties arose again this time. The same T-Mobile banners were on the inside of the towers which meant that both cameras had to be positioned very low. Again, this was going to mean a slow evaluation of the images because I had to continually switch between cameras. I had thought about running the cameras independently after the 2004 event, but will probably aim to do it next year. At least then, with two people on the laptops, the job should be speeded up.

First problem of the week arose, appropriately on Day One. All set up at the Castle Douglas finish when the power failed - still, plenty of time to go and the power engineers soon had it back on. Shortly afterwards it failed again, and I went looking over the electrician's shoulder whilst he had the generator in bits.

Castle Douglas was quite a dark finish due to heavy rain which came in just before the finish. It did make the judging of close finishes quite difficult as I was lined up on the centre black line, so I asked the Chief Judge if he had any objections to me lining up on the white for the other stages.

Trevor said it was OK by him, so that's what I did and the pictures were much better after that.

I must have been getting a bit cocky, because the following day at Blackpool was trouble free. So when I got to Sheffield for stage 3 everything would be fine! Wrong! We have to be on site early and the cameras were set up and running well by 10am. I tend to leave the image panes small at the bottom of the screen so that I can see the camera status all the time. With the riders due at the finish in about 5 minutes, one of the cameras turned red; this was not a good sign.

Barging my way out of the cabin and pushing judges and hangers-on out of the way I took a look at the offending camera (fortunately it was the one nearest me. The power was OK, but the network had gone down. Reseating the connectors and giving everything a good rattling, I waited for it to come up again. It didn't.

Then I shut the Lynx program down and started it up again. Still no camera - worse still, the other one also failed to start. Oh Bother I thought, wondering when we would be issued with brown trousers. Next I rebooted the laptop and started Lynx again. Both cameras fired up just as the leading riders came round the last bend with less than 100 metres to go. Phew!! Disaster averted.

I always use the same cables in the same ports and going to the same camera. This makes it easier to localise any faults. So the following day in Nottingham I changed the cables feeding camera one (Sorry Bob, it happened to your camera).

This was great as it would solve my problems. Wrong! Although I didn't detect a camera failure at the time, I found that one camera (yes, you've guessed which) missed the last 14 riders on the stage. It wasn't apparent at the time because I could read them all from camera 2. If there was a network failure I wouldn't have seen it because at that time I was looking at the images full screen and concentrating on numbers.

The only part of that setup which I hadn't changed was the 50 metre reel of CAT5 cable. Maybe that was the cause of the problem, but then I'm only guessing after the event.

We had gone through the film at the end of the Nottingham stage when Chief Judge Trevor declared that one rider was mising from the result. He checked through the non-starters and known non-finishers on his list and we were still short of one man. So we went through the images from both cameras again in minute detail. Still no missing man. Then he sent for the Commissaires who declared that the rider was definitely in the main bunch and that we must have missed him. The Commissaire President asked all the right questions, Were the cameras covering the entire road width? Was the button operated for every rider?

I could answer the first question with a 'Yes' and checked with Colm who was operating the capture button for me. He was adamant that he hadn't missed anyone, and I felt really bad about pressing him again. So I stuck to my guns and declared that as far as I was concerned our rider had not crossed the line. This wasn't good enough for some of the Commissaires who I thought were rude and quite aggressive (only the British ones though!). We must have gone through the images nearly a dozen times and the whole process delayed the production of the stage result by over an hour.

In the end we decided to leave it there but that evening I took the laptop into the hotel and went through the pictures again, still coming to the same conclusion. Then later in the hotel restaurant I was just sitting down to eat when Trevor came up. "You know that rider we can't find?" he said, "Well, he didn't start". When the signing-on sheet had been checked it was found that he hadn't signed on. Our anger was passed on to the Commissaires who should have known, but the bright side is that we were never troubled by those particular officials for the rest of the race.

I had planned that Birmingham would be a day off for me as it was the timetrial stage. However I decided to stay on hand and have a look at the timing operation. The race timing was again done by the guys from Ireland and I wanted to see how their setup differed from that which we normally do.

I had always maintained that we could use our timing equipment on a race like this, but I have changed my mind - with what we currently have available, we couldn't!

They used ALGE equipment which I am totally unfamiliar with. I know that Roger uses different kit which will provide the same level of service, but our Omega timing kit is rather long in the tooth these days.

The picture (left) shows the layout in the results/timing vehicle. When we time a timetrial, the riders' start times are pre-programmed as per time of day. There's not usually a problem with this, but on the Tour more flexibility was needed.

So they connected a starting clock (below) which gives the usual 'beeps' as a countdown. Again, Roger has something very similar.

The clock was hard wired to the finish computer as the distance was only around 100 metres or so, but I believe that a remote connection is possible if the start and finish points are a long way apart.

As a rider started a pulse was sent to the finish and another telephone connection was used to identify the rider. This meant that the pulse could be attributed to a particular rider's number.

The scoreboard configuration is shown in this next picture (left). Four boards were used, two facing each way as shown here. When the approaching rider is identified his number appears on the board, and when the finish is triggered the time is displayed together with his position. Again, this differs from our Omega setup because we can only show time and not placing.

The whole timing operation worked very well and I was impressed with how it all came together. Another difference between this and the way we operate was in the number of people involved. We time the national timetrial with one man on the computer and one 'down the road'.

On the Tour there were seven people doing the job! Two in the timing cabin, one on the start clock, two spotters and one operating the button on the finish line. There was also a 'floater' to do a bit of trouble-shooting.

How about that, Bob? I think we do it on the cheap.

This is just as it appeared on the laptop. I've done nothing with the picture apart from auto-cropping it at the time. As you can see, part of the image is breaking up into pixels and is barely readable. This happened on both cameras but not always at the same time.

I have seen this before in Malaysia and asked for Roger's advice. He said that this can happen if our network cables come into contact with PA cables. The setup in London was a bit of a rat's nest as far as all the cabling was concerned, and I noticed later that some helpful soul had bundled our cables with everything else which was coming down from the gantry. Looks like something else which needs to addressed in the future.

Here's the timing and photofinish team pictured at Westminster (left). I wanted to include Seamus who runs the results service, but it was proving difficult to get us all together as it was a busy day. We just couldn't find him at the time.

[left to right]

Colm, Gerard, Brian, Frank, John, Tom.

So here he is flying solo (right). I have taken the liberty of 'pinching' his image from his own website.

Looks like the pic was taken in Malaysia unless Dublin has suddenly gone tropical due to global warming.

There's got to be an

And finally......

so here it is (left),

again taken at Nottingham