In the pursuit of greater time accuracy, significant advances in timekeeping were made at the 7th Olympic Winter Games. The results of the cross-country skiing events were accurate to one hundredth of a second, setting a timing standard that international sports federations hoped to uphold in future major international competitions. Timekeeping has evolved since then. At Rio 2016, the Games’ official timekeeper Omega introduced a photo-finish camera capable of taking 10,000 digital images per second, while its Quantum Timer, first introduced at London 2012, has an improved resolution of one millionth of a second and is 100 times more accurate than previous devices.

Another time-related innovation was the use of start gates in the Alpine skiing events, where judges previously used two synchronized stopwatches, one at the start and one at the finish. These new gates used a buzzer sound and a visual signal similar to a traffic light to automatically trigger the official start time. After their successful introduction in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1956, they have been used at every Winter Olympic Games since then.

There have also been developments in the area of ​​broadcasting. Cortina d’Ampezzo 1956 was the first Winter Olympics to be broadcast live and in black and white to a multinational audience. Coverage was carried by Italy’s state broadcaster RAI and transmitted via Eurovision (now part of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU)) to eight European countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and West Germany. To bring the excitement of the Games home, RAI positioned four cameras at various points along the bobsleigh track, allowing viewers to follow the athletes virtually 24 hours a day. Television coverage of the Olympic Games is now truly instant and far-reaching; Beijing 2022 was watched by a global audience of 2.01 billion people.

In the sporting world, ski jumping entered a new era with the introduction of an innovative aerodynamic style – the so-called “Dascher technique”. It was developed in the early 1950s by the Swiss jumper Andreas Dascher. It involves keeping the body straight and the skis parallel, leaning as far forward as possible towards the tips of the skis and keeping the arms beside the body. In contrast to the Norwegian tradition of bending the upper body and stretching the arms in a jumping position, the Dascher technique enabled athletes to jump further. The Finnish ski jumpers Antti Hyvarinen and Aulis Kallakorpi used this technique with great success at the only ski jumping competition in 1956 in Cortina d’Ampezzo on the normal hill, winning gold and silver respectively. Today’s ski jumpers use the V-style, developed by Swedish ski jumper Jan Bokloev in the mid-1980s, while the Dascher technique fell out of favor in the early 1990s.