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Did you know the reason that Olympic track and field doesn’t use starting pistols anymore is that the runners farthest from the gun were posting demonstrably slower start times. Even with the help of digital speakers. This is crazy.
For a long time, the sound of the gun was pumped in from behind each runner at the same time it fired, but runners would still wait for the sound of the actual gun:
[Michael] Johnson’s reaction time, [Peter Hürzeler of OMEGA] said, “was 440 thousandths of a second. Normally athletes leave between 130 and 140 thousandths of a second. … I asked him, why did you have such a bad starting time?” Turned out, Johnson was in the ninth position, and the sound of the gun was reaching him too slowly.
Four tenths of a second is a massive amount of time in a sprint. Which sounds even crazier when you realise that it’s caused by the amount of time it takes the bang to go from a gun to an athlete’s ears, 20m away on the starting blocks. [The Atlantic]
Image credit: Michael Steele/Getty Images Sport
On a similar note – from what I understand, Michael Phelps lost his gold in 200m butterfly yesterday because he didn’t touch the pad strongly enough: the 0.05s difference between him and Le Clos was the time it took for the pad sensors to trip.
Looking at the footage last night, it wasn’t the pads – Phelps just didn’t get there first.
His final stroke left him around half a stroke’s distance from the wall, so all he could do was glide in, whereas Le Close had the distance perfect, so the natural kick & stretch of his final stroke put him in contact with the wall.
You are correct.
I’m biased… but you are wrong. He came up short and whilst reaching out again for the pad Le Clos touched in.
They’re claiming a 300/1000 seconds disadvantage? Each lane is 48″ wide so lane 1 to 9 is about 10m. 10m @ 340m/s (speed of sound) takes ~30/1000 seconds, not 300/1000. Still 0.03s is a not insignificant advantage.
It is in the 100m. I can vouch for this as an athlete 20 years ago. Ok, subjective in the grand scheme of things but I lost out on gold by 0.02s. Unfortunately it wasnt at the Olympics.
Sure, 0.03s can decide a place. But it’s not the 0.3s the article claims.
Ah, I gets ya