a race in which two or more competitors finish at exactly the same time: The two horses finished in a dead heat. fig. Opinion pollsters call the Congressional race a dead heat, saying it is too close to call. (Definition of dead heat from the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English ˌdead ˈheat noun [ countable] a situation during or at the end of a race or competition in which two or more competitors have the same number of points etc, have reached the same level, or have taken the same time to complete a particular distance Examples from the Corpus dead heat • The trucks bound across the finish in almost a dead heat -- but it is a bad race for both.