Sprint guys, explain the .10 rule. Is the tolerance on the machine even .001?

But in this case it turns out Devon Allen didn't actually false start. It was faulty equipment that was recording reaction times that were faster than the athletes actually reacted.

This is absurd that you study a bunch of rando's, find a significant value in 0.10, and decide that no human could ever be different, no edge cases, nothing, esp not people who have trained their entire lives for reaction speed. Tests in a lab dont replicate life events at peak adrenaline. Killing the sport in the name of pseudo science.

Wow you are right. Its immediately obvious looking at the reactions of the last couple of championships that something is wrong with the timing. Coleman is traditionally the fastest starter in the world and his past reaction times are getting blown away here.

Do you know what's REALLY absurd? Eugene installed a reaction time system that doesn't work properly. Devon Allen didn't actually have a .099 reaction time. The system messed up.

Don't forget that in T&A there's an individual factor on the OTHER side of the gun!

You can't in any meaningful way compare reaction times unless you also measure how much longer or shorter the starter keeps the runners in their blocks before pulling the trigger. I seem to remember that "too long" has often been cited as the explanation for false starts.

Swimming solved these problems years ago with that electronic BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-GO that is always exactly the same.

It's not just the World Championships, it's the Olympics too. The Eugene reaction times are much faster than any other global championship ever.

Yet apparently there are a dozen + sets of blocks that hang in the back room. That are adjusted by athletes constantly and remain electronically tolerant to 1/1000th of a second. Even after being thrown on the cart and carried around the track, then dumped in a pile at the start.

Made of aluminum, rubber inserts and paint.

Handled like faberge eggs.

Exactly - and in the grey zone, give them a warning.

Sure, but I can't accept the science can say definitively 0.1000reation time is legit but 0.999 is a break and earns a DQ.

My solution is for between 0.95-0.10 pull it up but have a warning.

It was in the sports comments at the time albeit on a speculative basis, became kinda moot once he gut busted, but the rule has never been rolled back.

Those who have done excellent work in collating the previous reaction time and showing the discrepancy should try contacting reporters at significant outlets both in Eugene and nationally and see if you can get them interested in this story. The athletes will need informed public outcry to seek any kind of redress.

Years ago some meets used this method - well, it was actually that the first false start was charged to the field (without reviewing the video) then subsequent ones resulted in DQs. I remember the announcer explaining that a problem with that approach was that someone who usually has a slow reaction time would have an incentive to purposely false start so that those with faster reaction times would have to be a bit more careful and thus take away that advantage.

Can you not post an image here? I graphed the men's 100m and 110h RT in Doha and Eugene and obviously something is wrong here.

Here's the data anyway

Doha - Avg RT 155.5ms, 3 under 115ms

Eugene - Avg RT 133.1ms, 25 under 115ms

With 170+ samples in each population, a t-test suggests that the chance of this happening randomly is 2.86*10^-21. Like...atoms in the universe type of improbability.

Devon's RT of 99ms is just under 2 standard deviations better than average (1.98 to be exact). A Z-score of 1.98 equates to a percentile of 97.6. The data appears fairly normally distributed, which means that we can reasonably expect about 1 in 42 athletes to be (falsely) disqualified based on the performance of the population as a whole. Obviously we can't have a system that just arbitrarily disqualifies the best 2%, but it seems that's what we're working with.

The next fun thing will be to see how the 200m RTs compare. If we end up back in the 150ms range it'll be another 1 in a million (or billion or whatever depending on the actual number) situation and we'll be able to assess weather officials have quietly attempted to remedy the problem without admitting it ever existed

Good work. You can upload to imgbb and link it.

That's the part I'm concerned about. It wouldn't surprise me if they fix the reaction time system, and then have it work correctly for the 200 and pretend it never was broken in the first place.

I can't speak to the design of this particular equipment, but I can claim domain specific knowledge in precision timekeeping. The time keeping part is trivial at that level of accuracy. The weak link would be the pressure sensor, but a piezo pressure sensor would easily resolve sub-millisecond level events.

Whether the semi-arbitrary cutoff for the rule is set at a reasonable level is arguable. The practical ability to resolve timing to that accuracy probably isn't.

Alright, I don't know if it really adds anything but if anybody wants to see if visually..

Histogram

Box/Whisker

No. I do not think the instrumentation is that old.

It happens often enough with guys trying to time the gun to get a jump and races being recalled. Then guys prancing around protesting and slowing things down even more.

If someone wants to run studies to indicate a different standard is needed then go for it. Present your data.

good work. just looking at the averages of the semi final races in eugene and doha and comparing them by eyesight will tell you something is wrong.