It happens: the athletes cross the line and due to some error, anomaly or malfunction, you have places but not times. What to do?
What is more important is what not to do! DO NOT MAKE UP TIMES!
The manner in which you proceed depends upon what you have.
First, figure out if you can recover times. In FinishLynx for example you can often recover times by finding and applying the correct start signal which are all logged in the FinishLynx system (Event > select start > apply correct start and reevaluate one athlete).
Second, get a reliable hand time and apply that time using appropriate methods (see instructions here). You can time the entire field off of your image with a reliable time on any athlete or relay team.
Third, enter information in your meet management program which will allow you to place the athletes/teams without having to enter fake times.
Start using AthleticRUNMEET -- a meet management solution that is available to all site supporters of AthleticNET (go to Manage Meet and find the AthleticRUNMEET icon ... it will be largely self explanatory from there, you will thank me for suggesting it -- meet management without the stress! Making amateurs look like pros, and pros look like hall of fame candidates). If you do, it is simple, you enter NT in the time box for each team, then click on the little pencil icon to the right and enter the place for each team and hit save. It is that simple!
But, if you still use Hy-Tek, for example, you can enter times under five seconds that place the athletes correctly. However, under Setup > Report Preferences you check the bottom left check box which will have the effect of reporting those times as NT while still placing the athletes in the correct order.Thus, entry of the times will place the teams and award points:But the fake times will not reflect incorrectly as times HTML meet results:
If it is a multi heat event, then you will need to integrate those times into the overall placement (as best as you are able) using the Judges Decision feature:
Of course, if it is a non-scoring heat, you could just enter NT in the time/mark column in Hy-Tek to begin with.
IMPORTANT: The meet results will have to be uploaded as HTML results and NOT as semi-colon delimited because the semi-colon delimited file will show the times under 5 seconds.
If you choose to use the delimited results you can hand edit the file in a text editor to replace the 0.1, 0.2, etc. with NT.
You can find an equivalent for most other meet management software, or hand edit the results after the fact to correct the times from fake times to NT before publishing.
