Everything is measured from the gun, so the gun is the one thing that has to be right. A mat that misses somebody costs one result. A gun that is wrong costs every result in the wave.
How to set it, and how to fix a wrong one, is Wave starts — the gun. This page is about the start itself.
A start is the last read, and that is deliberate
People roll onto the start mat and stand there waiting. The first read is them arriving, sometimes minutes early. The last read is them leaving. So Podium takes the last read of the visit as the start.
Two things follow from that, and both bite people:
- Reads taken before the gun are thrown away. A finish mat parked near the start line will read the whole field standing around, and none of it counts.
- Do not lengthen the gate on a start point. A long gate merges a genuine second visit into the first one, so somebody who steps off and comes back gets the wrong start. See Timing points.
Keep the field off the mat until it is their wave
With waves going off one after another, a competitor standing on the start mat during somebody else's gun is a problem waiting to happen. Hold each wave behind the line and let them on when it is theirs.
This matters more than it sounds at a small event where everybody is milling about near the line.
Do you even need a start mat?
No. A wave start needs a gun, not a mat — everybody in the wave is timed from that moment whether or not anything read them.
A start mat buys you chip time: each person's time from when they crossed rather than from the gun. That is worth having when the field is big enough that the back of it takes a while to reach the line, and it is worth nothing at all in a small wave that starts together.
If you are not giving chip times, the start mat is one less thing to fail. Put the box on the finish instead.
Late starters
Somebody who misses the gun and sets off two minutes later gets a gun time measured from the gun, because that is what a gun time is. If they should be timed from when they actually went, they need a start read, which means a start mat — or a typed time to fill the gap (Typing a time in).
Decide the club's rule on this before the day, not while somebody is standing in front of you asking about it.
Before the gun, the three-item check
- Is the gun set for this wave? Nothing scores without one, and Podium says so plainly (Nothing is scoring at all).
- Is the finish named? Same again — it will not guess which mat is the finish.
- Is the "Not ready" list clear? That is the list of people who will get no result: no chip, or no number (Entrants, numbers and chips).
All three are two minutes of work before the race and an unfixable afternoon afterwards.
Not the answer you needed? Every help page · ask a person