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Splitting the Second: My Wacky Business in Olympic and Sports Timing
OAKLAND, Calif., June 24 /PRNewswire/ — Just in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Alex Cheng shares adventures of his eight years with an Olympic and sports timing company engaged in a wide spectrum of sports. He reveals behind-the-scene stories and shenanigans at such major events as the Montreal and Lake Placid Olympics, Pan Am Games and Commonwealth Games. He tells why rodeo barrel racing and sailboat racing are similar, how runners are different from swimmers and skiers, and how he introduced starting horns to U.S. competitive swimming.
If you are tired of the usual sports fare that is heavy on megabucks, drug scandals, or limited to top-ranked performers and statistics, here is a book that is refreshingly fun and novel. It is a fascinating — at times hilarious or shocking — collection of stories behind a business devoted to timing of sports events.
Alex entertains the reader with fascinating stories of a company that went into panic mode every weekend with dozens of championship events from Grand Prix to Firemen’s Musters. He shares stories about his unprecedented business of high-level sports timing. There are many observations behind the theater of TV sports that the public does not see. Alex tells human stories of commitment and spirit in the lowest-ranked competitors where there is no TV coverage. Included in the book are many trivia items not commonly known, such as an explanation of the precision timing needed in pigeon racing and how sexual attraction is used as incentive to fly home fast.
Alex yearned to start a company marketing unusual technologies and landed the North American rights to Olympic caliber timing systems made by Omega, the Swiss watch company. Helping his Swiss colleagues adapt to the sloppy nature of American sports is one funny chapter in this unusual book for sports fans. With extraordinary sports timers and scoreboards ranging from $10,000 to $500,000 and finding no established distribution channels for such products, he founded and operated Seagull, Inc. with innovative strategies both within and outside his company. The result was eight years of “fun, stress and lots of fascinating stories.” This book includes many photos taken by the author. “This is an easy-to-read book even for sports fans who don’t read,” says Alex.
Alex grew up in California and participated in many sports but never as a ranked competitor like those he met during his Seagull days. He is an avid snowboarder, competed once in the Canadian Nationals in curling, and raced sailboats in San Francisco Bay for over 20 years. He earned a BS from UCLA and an MBA from Stanford University and roams Silicon Valley as an independent marketing strategist for young companies with unique or leading-edge technologies. Contact him at:
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Alex Cheng