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Why There Are So Many Ties in Swimming
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoThe answer to the click bait title: Because the lane length can vary by more than the time difference. > In a 50 meter Olympic pool, at the current men’s world record 50m pace, a thousandth-of-a-second constitutes 2.39 millimeters of travel. FINA pool dimension regulations allow a tolerance of 3 centimeters in each lane ... Attempting to construct a concrete pool to any tighter a tolerance is nearly impossible; the effective length of a pool can change depending on the ambient temperature, the water temperature, and even whether or not there are people in the pool itself.
- sevenless 10y agoSo, build the pool slightly oversize, and have movable boards at one end that are laser-ranged to an accurate distance.
- zappo2938 10y agoThe have hard enough time just keeping the water not bright green.
- gingerrr 10y agoIf the presence or absence of people can affect the size, wouldn't the fact that swimmers start out of water and dive in screw this up? Unless the boards were mechanized/able to adjust after the fact to maintain the correct distance despite changes to the pool environment. I was imagining setting up the boards prior to the race, but if they are responsive that's different.
- paulcole 10y agoCool, problem solved. Can't wait to see this at the next Olympics!
- brianwawok 10y agoSounds like something an engineer would say :) Sure you can solve the problem. Is the solution worse than the problem? I think it might be here. A few ties beat spending millions on Lazer walls.
- Shish2k 10y agoThe olympics cost ~$15 billion to host; an accurate range finding device costs a couple of hundred dollars. Heck, with a 3cm margin of error right now, even a $20 tape measure would be an improvement. I'm sure they can afford it :P
- brianwawok 10y agoI think you missed the part about the pool expanding and contracting as the temperature changes. Also, think about the false start measurement devices. Are those accurate to a a microsecond?
- Shish2k 10y ago> expanding and contracting as the temperature changes. So measure and adjust the adjustable end-plates a few minutes before each round starts? How rapidly can the temperature change? (I have no idea, but I'm struggling to imagine it changing a huge amount in a small amount of time) > think about the false start measurement devices. Are those accurate to a a microsecond? I have no idea, but I don't see why not. 10,000 FPS cameras are available on the general market already, so you could record each swimmer's start and adjust the timings as if they had all started at the same moment :)
- danso 10y agoThere's probably more to setting up a sophisticated time-keeping operation than buying equipment.
- Shish2k 10y agoI'm sure there is - I'd like to know what the real problems are, because I'm pretty certain that "we don't have the technology to accurately measure 50m" can't be the whole story :)
- coltonv 10y agoThis title is not click bait at all. It presents a question and spends a brief article explaining the exact answer to the question. The answer is too long to fit in the title, and there's no click every paragraph to get to the next one bullcrap.
- logicallee 10y agoThe article is incredibly short and addresses what the title promises unbelievably succinctly. While you called it clickbait, you quoted literally 35.7% of it (577 of its 1613 characters) to show your point, and what you left out was interesting history. I think it's really rude of you to do this and use the word click bait.
- lpolovets 10y agoThe article says the tolerance is "3 centimeters in each lane," which feels surprisingly high. The longest race is the men's 1500m freestyle, which is 30 lengths of a 50m pool. That means that in the worst case, pool dimension errors can add 0.9m to someone's race -- about half a second of time in the 1500m. I bet there are races where 0.5 seconds makes a big difference.
- NegativeLatency 10y ago0.5 seconds in the 1500 is almost nothing though. In shorter races the difference is less meaningful
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Someone 10y agoI thought so, too, but looking at https://www.rio2016.com/en/swimming-sw-mens-1500m-freestyle-download https://www.rio2016.com/en/swimming-sw-mens-1500m-freestyle-..., there were quite a few differences smaller than that in Rio. 38 vs 39 is 0.03 seconds (in different heats, but qualification for further rounds is on time), 3 vs 4 is 0.24 seconds in the same heat. And I don't see how the race length would be a factor here, as it doesn't affect the relative difference. It's only at the really short races that the error becomes smaller than the accuracy of the timing.
- Someone 10y agoTolerance works two ways, so the difference could be 1.8m. However, I would expect that there is a high correlation between the size lengths of lanes in a single pool, so that one doesn't have one lane 3 centimeters too long and the one next to be 3 centimeters too short. It's weird that the standard doesn't make any requirements on that. Also, touch plates get installed after the pool is constructed. I would expect those could easily be made to compensate for any size differences. That would leave a size difference at the start, but that's easily fixed, too. Having said that, every few years or so there's a newspaper article of a swimming pool that gets constructed to be 50m, where the constructors forget about those touch plates.
- vilhelm_s 10y ago> a thousandth-of-a-second constitutes 2.39 millimeters of travel. FINA pool dimension regulations allow a tolerance of 3 centimeters in each lane, more than ten times that amount. [emphasis added] So by the same argument, they should not measure hundredths either...
- matheweis 10y agoEh, anything less than 0.0125s is 3cm and a tie. Pretty darn close to 0.01s and all you need to do is make sure the pool is accurate to within 2.3cm instead... Much more interesting to think about the delta between the clock that's accurate to hundredths. Someone could win with a time of 23.01s vs second places 23.00s... But is the delta really 0.01s, or was second place 23.00999999 with a delta of 0.00000001s?
- Qantourisc 10y agoNo-one is concerned about all the water vortices created in the pool by your competitors ? I suspect these would also add quite a bit of unfairness.
- niftich 10y agoIt's not clear whether lane placement affects results, but it's true that the middle lanes are often favored, and qualification systems tend to place better-performing swimmers towards the middle. Here's two non-professional discussions on the matter: [1] https://www.quora.com/In-competitive-swimming-why-are-the-inner-lanes-3-4-and-5-usually-the-fastest-Do-better-swimmers-qualify-to-get-them-Is-there-an-advantage-And-if-so-how-is-that-fair https://www.quora.com/In-competitive-swimming-why-are-the-in... [2] http://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/1326/in-swimming-is-there-a-competitive-advantage-to-being-in-one-lane-or-another http://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/1326/in-swimming-i...
- Qantourisc 10y agoI was more thinking along the lines of random-currents-bad-luck though. Al tough the out most lanes might have a small effect.
- dredmorbius 10y agoThe wave-eating lanelines do an excellent job of removing most of the effects of wakes. Turbulance from actual strokes is pretty minimised. Worst case is probably in the butterfly where the wake is maximised. Many other pool features, including both vents (bottom-mounted and highly deflected/diffused) and gutters (in the 1970s - 1980s usually large, below-deck, now often a set of ground-flush slats into which waves are absorbed) also minimise pool turbulence.
- maerF0x0 10y agogranted anecdotal, but when I was a swimmer lore was that center lanes were the fastest due to currents. They do a lot to counter these things though, special lane ropes, deeper pools etc. If you ever watch a lesser event (like non-olympic) they put less effort into dealing with the turbulence. see: https://youtu.be/Igf8PagbGKU?t=1m9s https://youtu.be/Igf8PagbGKU?t=1m9s as an example. look 3-5m behind those guys and see how crazy the water is and its spilling all over the other lanes. Also when they flip turn we used to wonder if it was better to go under your forward current that you were pushing just a second prior.
- bkjelden 10y agoI think another thing worth mentioning is that ties don't really seem to have a negative perception in swimming. None of the swimmers involved in the ties mentioned seemed to feel that their medals were delegitimized or somehow worth less because of the tie.
- quickben 10y agoWell, from my experience, back in my youth, you actually have to hit the board or it wouldn't register touch in so many cases. Then you have to rely on whoever is making the manual measurements for corrections and that is messy. Not every swimming competition can blow cash on slow motion photo finish cameras. I guess the rules are in place to make most for most swimmers.
- ForFreedom 10y agoWill someone explain the below in simple terms? "In a 50 meter Olympic pool, at the current men’s world record 50m pace, a thousandth-of-a-second constitutes 2.39 millimeters of travel. FINA pool dimension regulations allow a tolerance of 3 centimeters in each lane, more than ten times that amount. Could you time swimmers to a thousandth-of-a-second? Sure, but you couldn’t guarantee the winning swimmer didn’t have a thousandth-of-a-second-shorter course to swim."
- detaro 10y agoIf you measure the time the swimmers take very precisely and thus can tell that one swimmer reached the target a few milliseconds earlier, that could be because they are a faster swimmer than the second-placed. Or they could just have had a shorter lane to swim and win despite being slightly slower than the other. They swim around 2.39 mm per ms, and lane differences are allowed to be up to 3 cm, so this can make ~12 ms difference where you don't know where it is from.
- cncool 10y agoIf there can be up to 12 ms difference, how can they definitively say someone who swam a 50.100 s beat someone who swam a 50.110 s?
- ForFreedom 10y agoTechnically a lane cant be shorter in a swimming pool.
- detaro 10y agowhy not? The regulation only allows them to be longer than the specified lane length, yes, but that still means that one lane can be shorter than another.
- sytelus 10y agoThe question to ask is why so many races end up so close that we need millisecond precision? For races that end so close, I suspect winner is determined by random chance instead of true differentiation. The length of pool precision is not real concern but rather the possibility that we are hitting human + tech ceiling in this particular sport.
- sevenless 10y agoWell yes, but Olympic athletes and audiences tend not to like it very much if we try to do 50 replicates of the same race.
- pedalpete 10y agoI doubt this means we are hitting the human + tech ceiling. Many runners ran 4:02 miles before Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile. That was a mental ceiling. I suspect a similar mental issue exists in swimming. The goal you're trying to beat is your own world record or whatever you think is achievable at your current fitness. Other swimmers are aiming for the same goal. Then when swimming, you see the swimmer next to you, and he's swimming as fast as he can, you're pushing each other, the end result just may be that you push each other to the point where you get the same time, and sometimes that will be an Olympic or World Record, and sometimes it won't.
- maxander 10y agoIts utterly mind-blowing that humans of different races, with vastly different life histories and training regimens, competing in a sport with tremendous physical complexity, can wind up with performance equal to each other, to the limits of our ability to measure it. There's still some important lesson in the Olympics, despite everything.
- Someone 10y agoBut we could fairly easily measure it; we just don't find it worth the trouble. Also, as to the ties, that's almost purely a political choice made by the sporting body. In rowing, for example, the winner in the Olympic final was decided by looking at the finish photo (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/13/theres-only-one-gold-after-5000ths-of-a-second-divides-dead-heat/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/13/theres-only-one-g...), with both rowers getting the same time in hundreds of a second. I doubt they can align six boats to that precision at the start, even with equipment for holding the bows of the boats at the starting line.
- mhb 10y agoWhy don't they apply this same reasoning to rowing races in which the inter-lane variations can be much, much bigger than the margin between finishers?