Weird or coincidence?

[reece.bell]

I have a large race yesterday. About 6500 runners spread out over 26 separate races. For all of the girls races, I had 100% read rates and no issues. But for the boys races there were about 40 missed reads. I can't for the life of me figure out why it was only boys. Anyone have any thoughts about this?

[Brandon Daniels]

Would love to help!  But it's hard to tell without knowing anything about your gear, your setup or your timing process?

Can you give us more details?

For all we know, it could be a bad batch of tags that got into your inventory?  I double chip my bibs to minimize missed reads due to faulty chips.  But even with 40 misses, you're still batting at a 99% read rate which is annoying to perfectionists... but isn't really that bad at all, haha

[Brandon Daniels]

Also if a participant comes through and their chip doesn't read... if you have time, you can try asking for that participant's chip to identify if it's a bad chip issue or not.  When things don't go my way, I'm pretty stubborn about trying to figure out what went wrong while I'm still on site.  But again you still had 99% reads, so great job with so many participants and probably a lot of congestion 👏🏽

[SportMadeSimple]

A few ideas based on past experiences:

1.  boys in my races tend to be much more likely to stop watches or cover their bib number in a pose as they finish which is probably the largest contributor to a missed read

2.  could the boys chip have been read while cheering for the girls so it didn't read because it already had read earlier?

3.  boys in my races tend to be much more likely to bunch up and sprint finish where the girls tend to gap each other earlier in the race... means more congestion and faster finish, either of which can contribute to  a miss.

[Brian Agee]

I'd also be curious if seem to be a particular team or couple of teams the 40 boys were mostly composed of. Watch it be something dumb like the team has a ritual of wadding up their bibs before the race for good luck or to make them more pliable while running. :)