Measuring Time

Abstract

Chapter 4 explores the technologies of measurement and the enfleshed experience of time and of losing time: embodied time and recorded non-human time. It explores questions about how the experience of being in time can be recorded or accessed and how different systems apply to particular sports. The chapter examines some of the ways in which the movement of time is recorded in media coverage and press and news reports as well as in the records of time measuring devices. Technological advances have led to ever more precise and sophisticated measurement of time which has influenced and shaped the techniques of athletes and their training regimes, strategies and body practices — body practices and recording mechanisms interrelate.

Women’s boxing in the Olympics in 2012 offers a most dynamic set of processes in which temporal forces are implicated in diverse ways: being in time and making history by changing times at the right time and where time is both a constraint and a liberating force. Boxing also presents an interesting example of the entangled forces of flesh and time and the measurement of time by the clock and through, for example, comparisons of the women’s and the men’s events in terms of times and timing. This exploration of boxing leads into the next chapter which engages with future time.