2020 INTERNATIONAL SWIMMING LEAGUE: MATCH 3
- Saturday, October 24: 12 PM – 2 PM Local Time (6 AM – 8 AM Eastern, 7 PM – 9 PM Japan Time)
- Sunday, October 25: 5 PM – 7 PM Local Time (12 PM – 2 PM Eastern, 1 AM – 3 AM J+1 Japan)
- Duna Arena – Budapest, Hungary
- Short Course Meters (SCM) Format
- 2020 ISL Scoring Format
- 2020 ISL Prize Money and Bonuses
- How To Watch
- ISL Match 3, Day 1 Full Results
- Teams: Toronto Titans, Tokyo Frog Kings, Aqua Centurions, LA Current
Anybody who follows me on Twitter knows that I’ve been rather critical of the early presentation of the International Swimming League.
While the pacing and the graphics quality of the meet are certainly novel, that’s been lost on a lot of the other problems.
While the league still has a long way to go, on Sunday they unveiled a new innovation that is, single-handedly, the best thing that the ISL has done so far: live in-race places.
Not just at the turns where there are splits.
Not just at the finish.
But live, in real time, throughout the race. Just as we proposed at the end of last season.
The places are shown as an overlay on the lane behind the athletes, almost as a tail. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s still amazing to watch.
This is the innovation that the ISL needed to make the format work for TV. Now you feel like you can watch a race and know what’s happening during the race, not just a sort of black box that emerges at the end with some points.
THIS is the future of swimming.
I like the some of ISL’s Innovation on things like this but can they at least take a cue from some of the successful things FINA/IOC does? For example, I love the athlete stories that NBC produces shortly before an athlete’s race so it lets the viewer get to know the athlete a little before their race. Don’t have to reinvent the wheel completely.
Now they need to fix all the glitches they had today with displaying the points at the end of races. They also need to show the lane assignments at the start of the race in EVERY race not just some.
Sometime I wonder how they even put these up so quickly as the race progresses. This is a truly amazing and useful graphic.
Still, if they can do this, why can’t they put times up? Last season they would show the winner’s time, but why did they stop showing times at all? I’ve seen club team livestreams do better than the ISL on showing times, not to despise the ISL in any way.
They want it to be team oriented still and about points not just the times
It’s because the ISL doesn’t care about times. Times are irrelevant to the sport. It’s a team based sport where you score points to win matches and earn money. Not that hard to understand why they don’t care about times. You want timed swimming go watch a boring ass FINA event.
If times don’t matter then why do jackpot times exist?
Yes! I love this graphic!
Yes agreed. They need to shrink it a tiny bit and move it back off the swimmer as it over laps them a bit.
On the split times I want to see an up or down arrow beside each swimmer to show if they moved up or lost ground the last 50.
It’s good. Still waiting for the actual times though.