Free Athletics scoreboard

Why score Athletics with ScoreZen

• ✓One-tap scoring, built for Athletics
• ✓Share the live score by QR code or link
• ✓Free for spectators — no app to install to watch
• ✓Keeps working if the connection drops
• ✓34 sports, tournaments and standings included

How Athletics scoring works

In track events, the 'score' is the recorded time. Fully automatic electronic timing starts on the pistol shot and stops when the torso crosses the line, accurate to a hundredth of a second (thousandth to separate ties). The lowest time wins. In team or points competitions (meetings, inter-club championships), each placing earns points on a scale and the team with the highest total wins; but the individual event itself is ranked by time.

Match format

Events are usually run in qualifying heats, then semi-finals and a final depending on the number of entrants. In sprints and the 800 m, athletes run in assigned lanes; in middle and long distance (from the 800 m after the first bend, or directly from 1500 m upward), athletes group together. An athletics meeting combines several track and field events over a single day or weekend.

How to win

The winner is the first athlete whose torso crosses the finish line, that is the one with the lowest time. In the event of a perfect thousandth-of-a-second tie for qualification, the athletes involved are separated or both advanced according to the competition rules. In relays, it is the team whose final runner crosses the line first.

Recommended ScoreZen setup

Set ScoreZen to stopwatch / ascending-time mode: the lowest time wins. Start the clock, then tap Finish for each of the two participants as they cross the line; the smaller time takes it, shown live. There is no manual time entry or multi-athlete ranking, and no per-placing points scale for this sport — for a placing scale, build a Custom sport in simple mode. Statuses like DQ/DNF/DNS are noted manually as they fall outside the time comparison.

How an athletics result is actually built

Athletics runs two scores at once, and confusing them is the first mistake. One is the performance, a time, a distance or a height, which settles the event. The other is the meet score, the points a club or a school piles up across a whole programme of events, and that one settles the day.

On the track, athletes are placed in the order in which any part of the body, the torso as distinguished from the head, neck, arms, legs, hands or feet, reaches the vertical plane of the nearer edge of the finish line (Technical Rule 18.2). Nothing is rounded down: photo-finish times are converted to the next longer hundredth (Technical Rule 19.23.1), hand times to the next longer tenth, so 10.11 is recorded as 10.2 (Technical Rule 19.10.1), and races run partly or entirely outside the stadium to the next longer whole second.

In the field, a result is the best of all an athlete's trials, never a total (Technical Rule 25.21). Outside the high jump and pole vault, where there are more than eight athletes each of them takes three trials and the eight best valid performances take three more, unless the applicable regulations provide otherwise (Technical Rule 25.6). Once the official signals that everything is ready, the trial has to begin inside the time allowed: one minute while more than three athletes remain, and longer as the field shrinks, up to five minutes for a lone pole vaulter (Technical Rule 25.17). The vertical jumps run on another logic: the result is the best height cleared, three consecutive failures end that athlete's competition except where there is a tie for first place (Technical Rule 26.2), and equal heights are split by countback (Technical Rule 26.8).

The meet score is left to the competition regulations. World Athletics asks only that the method of scoring be agreed by all the competing teams before the start, unless the applicable regulations already provide for it (Technical Rule 13), which is why it changes from one country to the next. Dual meets and school leagues usually score by finishing place, with the scale, and the weight given to relays, set by whoever writes the regulations. The French club championship, the Interclubs, ignores places: every mark is converted into points on the World Athletics international scoring table, the one French clubs call the Hungarian table, men's and women's points feed a single club total, and a withdrawal, an abandon, a disqualification or an unplaced athlete is worth zero. Combined events do the same for one person, ten events in the decathlon, seven in the heptathlon, ranked on the total from the Combined Events Scoring Tables (Technical Rules 39.2, 39.3 and 39.11).

(World Athletics, Technical Rules, Book C2.1, rules 8, 13, 17, 18, 19, 25, 26, 29, 39 and 54; for the Interclubs scoring, the French federation's national competition regulations.)

The recording mistakes that decide athletics results

The expensive mistake is writing down only the height. Two vaulters finish on 4.30, the card says 4.30 and 4.30, and nothing can separate them, because the countback lives in the attempts and not in the bar. Record every attempt at every height, in order: o for cleared, x for failed, a dash for a pass. The countback reads the lowest number of jumps at the height last cleared, then, if they are still level, the lowest total of failures up to and including that height, not across the whole competition (Technical Rules 26.8.1 and 26.8.2).

The same trap catches horizontal jumps and throws. Athletes sharing a best mark are separated by their second best, then the third, and so on, so a card carrying only the winning distance is useless; and if they are still level it is officially a tie, which outside the vertical jumps simply stands, first place included (Technical Rule 25.22). Write down every trial, all six for those who reach the later rounds, and write failures as failures: a foul at the board is a failed trial, not a missing one, and a pass is not a foul.

Third, what the wind reading is for. The gauge runs ten seconds from the flash or smoke of the gun in the 100 m and thirteen seconds in the 100 m and 110 m hurdles (Technical Rule 17.12), and five seconds from the moment the athlete passes a mark set 40 m from the take-off line in the long jump and 35 m in the triple jump (Technical Rule 29.12); one reading belongs to one race or one trial and never to the next. Above 2.0 m/s nothing is cancelled: the athlete still wins and the mark still counts for the meet, it just cannot be ratified as a record.

Fourth, mixing currencies: hand times and electronic times do not share a ranking untreated, and a school 100 m timed by volunteers is not a photo finish. Fifth, in combined events only one false start per race is allowed without disqualification, so a first one costs nobody their race and whoever is responsible for the next one in that same race is disqualified by the starter (Technical Rule 39.8.3). And in race walking what counts is three red cards from three different judges reaching the Chief Judge (Technical Rule 54.7.1); where a penalty zone is used, those three cards send the athlete into the zone instead, and a further red card from a fourth judge disqualifies (Technical Rules 54.7.3 and 54.7.5). The recorder keeps the board, not the verdict.

Keeping the record on competition day

One recorder per event area, and they stay there. In a throwing circle or beside a runway, the recorder sits with the card, facing the judges, and does not wander off to watch the 800 m. Athletics loses results in the gaps: the trial taken while nobody was writing, the relay leg nobody logged.

Before the first trial, check bibs against the start list and fix the order of trials. In the high jump and pole vault, the Referee or the Chief Judge announces the starting height and every subsequent height before the competition begins (Technical Rule 26.1); the bar can never go up by less than 2 cm in the high jump or 5 cm in the pole vault, and the increment can never grow (Technical Rule 26.4). Athletes build their whole competition on that ladder, so write it down before anyone jumps.

During the event, announce every measurement out loud as it is taken, and show it. A distance called across a stadium is heard by nobody; a mark on a screen is read by the coach, the athlete and the parent in the same second. Write the result when the judge signals, not at the end of the round.

Then publish. A protest about the result or the conduct of an event is made orally to the Referee, within thirty minutes of the official announcement of that result, and the organisers have to record the time of every announcement (Technical Rules 8.2 and 8.3); before that announcement, a correction is only a correction. So announce early and announce visibly. At the end the recorder signs the card and hands it to the secretariat, and that version is the one that counts.

What ScoreZen changes for athletics

ScoreZen measures nothing. It does not time a 100 m, read a wind gauge or pull a tape. It carries the other score, the one nobody displays: the running team total of a club match, a school meet or an Interclubs fixture, kept on a phone and visible to everybody at once.

You score with one thumb, then share the competition with a link or a QR code taped to the stadium gate. Parents, grandparents at home and the athlete sitting out the season follow the total live, free, unlimited, without an account. In the stand, TV mode fills a screen or a laptop plugged into a television, the transparent overlay drops the live score into OBS, and the A4 score sheet prints for the paper your federation still wants.

For a meeting weekend, ScoreZen runs knockout with an optional third-place match, home-and-away championships, pools then a final bracket, Swiss system, best-of-3 and best-of-5 series, and rotating teams. A single QR code covers the whole tournament: every competitor opens it and finds their own fixture inside, so there is no code to print per event area.

Afterwards the Replay summary and the vertical Story image are made to be shared. The club site embeds the widget, the fixtures export to CSV, the public read-only API needs no key, and the ICS calendar feed drops the schedule into any diary. Where the signal dies under a stand, ScoreZen keeps counting without a network and resyncs when it comes back, in 25 languages. Three trial matches are free for life; then one payment of €1.99unlocks it for life.

Frequently asked questions