ATLANTA — The RunnerCam has been a staple of 11Alive's coverage of the AJC Peachtree Road Race for many years. But before there was RunnerCam – there was 1999 runnercam
"Take a look at this rig," a TV reporter intones in 1999 video, as the viewer sees a young man named Mike Daly, holding a US flag attached to an unwieldy pole, and a consumer-grade camcorder.
During the 1996 Olympics, Daly used a portable TV transmitter attached to a pole for live coverage downtown, where an enduring idea took root.
"If we could do (live TV) shots from anywhere we wanted from inside the Olympics, why couldn’t we couldn’t we do one live from inside the race?" Daly recalled Wednesday.
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During the 1999 Peachtree, and many subsequent road races, Daly carried a TV camera. Which was the easy part.
The live signal was the hard part.
Viewers saw another runner - typically the TV "talent" - during the race. What they didn’t see was Daly, running alongside. The pole transmitter he also carried sent the TV signal to a helicopter hovering above, which bounced it to a tower of the nearby TV station. That sent the live picture to viewers.
"There was a camera pointed one way, and a pole pointed the other," Daly explained. "The hardest part was keeping the pole pointed toward the helicopter."
It was a challenge – running six miles while managing a TV camera and a TV signal.
"You couldn’t actually see what you were doing. You wanted to make sure you didn’t step over anybody because if you fell on somebody, that was a lot of gear going down," Daly said.
Thankfully, that never happened. Although the signal for the first runnercam winked out periodically – it impressed Emmy award judges enough to give Daly a technical achievement trophy.
"I seem to remember that it worked enough to keep people interested to where the management asked us to do it again and again," Daly recalled.
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