Time Machine

The complex mechanism that works silently in the backdrop of the Asian Games is as mindboggling as it is precise.

- Abhishek Mande Bhot

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.”