4 ms·
Will 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
by ForFreedom 10y ago
Will 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.