The complex mechanism that works silently in the backdrop of the Asian Games is as mindboggling as it is precise.
They say the greatest athletes experience a competition in slow motion. Athletes who’re able to do this have already won because they’ve seen their opponents inching towards them in a race, or gured the point guard’s next move, or the cricket ball’s turns. It’s what makes someone like, say, David Lee execute the greatest buzzer-beater for the New York Knicks in the 2006 NBA season, with just a tenth of a second to spare.
For their opponents, it can be particularly disorienting. They’ve no clue how the ball was snatched from under their nose or how the batsman hit them for a six or just how Jamal Crawford delivered that perfect lob, and Lee the almost impossible alley-oop right after. But to watch it unfold again, frame after frame on timekeeping screens, is what holding “infinity in the palm of your hand” must feel like – a single moment broken down into a series of innumerable parts.
The process of timekeeping is as scientific as the idea of time poetic. It has to be clinical and precise, down to the final hundredth of a second. “No one will know what’s going on if you don’t keep time,” a Tissot timekeeping engineer at the 18th Asian Games in Indonesia tells me. “People will just be running around with no purpose.”
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2018 من GQ India.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2018 من GQ India.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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