Seiko and IAAF renew partnership with six-year deal
Seiko has announced that it has renewed its timing services sponsorship deal for the IAAF World Championships by signing up for a further six years.
The new agreement will include three IAAF World Championships, in Beijing in 2015, London in 2017 and in 2019 in a city yet to be decided. It also covers 22 other events during the period, including the IAAF World Indoor Championships and the sport’s major development events, the IAAF World Junior and IAAF World Youth Championships.
In a statement, Seiko said: “[Our] timing, measuring and display systems are custom designed for athletics and are built specifically for the IAAF’s events. As a result, they have always been, and always will be, at the leading edge of sports technology.
“At each of the IAAF’s 25 events in the coming six years, Seiko’s timing engineers will be on hand to install, operate and monitor the timing and measuring equipment. Drawn from Japan and the UK, Seiko’s team at each IAAF World Championships will be at least fifty strong and over 800 man days will go into the planning and delivery of the service to each Championships.”
In recent years Seiko has developed a new false start detection system, new LED-equipped field event boards, and most revolutionary of all, a video distance measurement system for long and triple jumps that has greatly improved the precision, verifiability and speed of the results.
The deal was originally established in 1985, when it was agreed that Seiko would provide timing services to the 1987 IAAF World Championships in Rome and several other events in the intervening period.
Shinji Hattori, chairman and group CEO of Seiko Holdings, said: “We are delighted to renew our IAAF partnership for a further six years. This new long-term agreement allows us the time to work with the IAAF and plan new timing and measurement technologies that will really make a difference to the athletes, the officials and the spectators.
IAAF president Lamine Diack, added: “I am delighted that the IAAF and Seiko have renewed their long standing partnership for a further six years. This announcement is a further endorsement that the global sport of Athletics remains extremely attractive to major corporations.”
