Two medals changed hands at the 4,200-athlete Atlantic Games after officials corrected results produced by an AI-assisted finish-line camera, organisers said on Friday. The 12-day event, held across Lisbon and Setúbal, ended with a dispute over who should have spotted the error before the first results went up.
The problem began on 1 October at Lisbon’s Estádio Universitário, when a venue cart caught the camera’s floor cable and turned its mount by about two degrees. A technical report published by the organisers says the software kept using its earlier calibration and placed the finish line 19 centimetres (7.5 inches) beyond the painted stripe.
How the results went wrong
The offset affected the 200-metre (219-yard) and 400-metre (437-yard) finals. Initial results showed a different silver medallist in the 200m and a different winner in the 400m; officials changed both classifications after reviewing the camera’s full-frame footage and a separate backup recording.
Heather Watson, a 200m finalist, said athletes had been sent to the medal area before the revised results appeared. “We were told the screen was final, then asked to wait, then told it had changed,” she said. “People train for years, and a number on a screen can decide whether that work gets recognised.”
Organisers said no athlete lost a place because of the corrected results, but the delay lasted 46 minutes. The timing platform, supplied by the fictional Portuguese firm LumeTrack, cost €1.8 million (about $2.1 million) as part of a wider event technology contract, according to the organisers’ published procurement summary.
A trial under pressure
Beatrice S. Antonsen, the event’s technical director, said the AI system was meant to identify the finish stripe automatically and flag any camera movement. The alert did not activate because the software treated the shifted image as a routine change in track lighting. “The system should have stopped and asked for a human check,” she said. “It did not, and we own that failure.”
LumeTrack engineer Kristofer Leppik said the camera hardware continued recording and that the disputed results came from the software’s calibration layer, not missing footage. He said the firm had recommended a manual verification step for close finishes, but organisers had not made it mandatory across every event. The company will provide a software update before the next competition using the platform.
Some team officials want the system withdrawn; others say the backup footage prevented the error from becoming permanent. Deniz Erkekli, an athletics timing specialist advising one delegation, said automated line detection can speed up results but should never replace a trained operator’s review. Organisers have suspended automatic publication of finish times and will require a human sign-off for the rest of the season’s events.
