YOU CAN’T blame sports fans for reaching for their wallets every time a team or event sponsor announces a new multi-million dollar business deal. After all, when was the last time a Major League Baseball television pact, Madison Square Garden advertising agreement or a new stadium financing plan meant lower ticket prices,lower taxes or lower cable bills?
So it would have been perfectly normal for sports fans and runners to guard their money when the New York Road Runners Club and Microsoft Corp. agreed on a multi-year partnership to bring a high-tech revolution to the world’s No. 1 marathon.
Would runners need to subscribe to the software giant’s MSN service to run in the race? Pledge allegiance to Windows? Write their Representative and tell them to keep their grubby little anti-trust fingers off Gates and Co.?
The answer, surprisingly, is no, no and no.
The deal worked out between the club’s marketing guru Scott Lange and Microsoft appears to be a win-win for runners.
It brings high-tech wizardry to the run, in the form of chips laced onto runners’ sneakers. The chip allows runners to get a more precise finish time and get it a lot easier – at home on their PC. Eventually, it may even allow anyone to track any runner’s progress, mile-by-mile, through the city like an air traffic controller tracking a plane.
The chips are coded with a runner’s number and log the time when they pass over markers placed on the course, like the start and finish lines, and at mile points. The more markers, the more split times. Instead of seeing Uncle Bob pass by one point, you would be able to track him at, say, a couple of dozen points.
The Microsoft ChampionChip technology, as well as other chips being rolled out at other races around the country, could be the biggest change to the marathon since King Edward VII pulled rank during the 1908 Olympics in London and changed the distance of the race so it would end in front of his royal box.
For this year’s race, on Sunday, with the chip technology still in its infancy, Lange and company will post just three live split times – 10K, half and 20 miles – and just for the elite runner. Each runner’s finish time will be posted on a 15-minute delay.
“We didn’t want to blow out the computers on the first time using the chips,” Lange told The Post. “Next year, we may go live and may add splits for all runners. We want to make sure we have this down right before we add features.”
Every runner will receive his split times on his finisher’s certificate.
Eventually, every runner could be tracked every mile, making the marathon, in a very high-tech sort of way, much more of a spectator sport than it is today. Times will be posted on “www.nycmarathon.msn.com.”
For Lange, the true value of the Microsoft deal lies in the software giant’s sponsorship of the first-ever NYC Marathon home page. Microsoft will promote the race on its other Websites, thus casting a much wider awareness net for the 34,000-runner race.
For runners and their families, however, the true value of the partnership is the improved reporting of times. All at no extra charge. Which makes it one of the rare sports business deals fans can actually enjoy.
