The sound waves from the gun are always exactly .1s away from every single lane at every single stadium...suuuuuure. what an idiotic arbitrary rule.
do they fire from the side of the track?
assume 5 meters between allen in lane 3 and the guy in lane 8. allen hears the gun 0.014 seconds earlier. So .1 is fine for lane 8, but .086 is a false start for allen.
gonna be the biggest mainstream sports media story of the championships. so sad for the sport.
You must be joking. By the end of the championships, there isn't a single non-track fan in the entire world that will remember anything about what the reaction time was at the start of a men's 110h race.
assume 5 meters between allen in lane 3 and the guy in lane 8. allen hears the gun 0.014 seconds earlier. So .1 is fine for lane 8, but .086 is a false start for allen.
That's totally incorrect. The "gun" sound isn't from a real gun. It's a gun sound that comes out of a speaker placed directly behind each starting block.
The sound waves from the gun are always exactly .1s away from every single lane at every single stadium...suuuuuure. what an idiotic arbitrary rule.
do they fire from the side of the track?
assume 5 meters between allen in lane 3 and the guy in lane 8. allen hears the gun 0.014 seconds earlier. So .1 is fine for lane 8, but .086 is a false start for allen.
There is a speaker behind each set of blocks. They all hear the gun at the same time.
gutted for him. even in the slow motion you cant see a false start and definitely not a discernible advantage.
OF COURSE you can't see it when a reaction time is .099 vs .10 . Neither can any other human on the planet. Our eyes aren't that good. That's why there are sensors in the blocks.
Track has lots of problems. Doping (obvs) which is an ongoing saga that may never be resolved. Intersex/DSD athletes has also been a highly controversial and complicated challenge for World Athletics. But this situation... this might be the most embarrassing (but easiest to solve!!) of them all. It is so clear to just about everyone that this was arbitrary and wildly unfair, and it sends a terrible message to young people watching the sport - that if you work super super hard for years you could be penalized for being 'too good' and then not even get to compete?! I love track and field but this really casts a pall over the entire championships (and World Athletics deserves every bit of the bad press they will get after this)
Electronics expert here-- these sensors in the blocks are probably piezo transducers, and they send out a voltage spike that is measured by some kind of oscilloscope. the response time of piezos is on the order of 1s to 10s of microseconds (0.000001 to 0.000050 seconds, 0.000050 being the slowest one I could find on a cursory google search versus the margin of 0.000100 seconds for Devon Allen's harsh DQ). So if the sensor measured 0.9998, he might have been safe, but if it measured 0.9990, that probably wouldn't round up. either way, this is splitting hairs, and the rule is at fault, not the sensors IMO.
And their study resulted in EXACTLY .100000. Not .097. Not .104. Exactly .100. How convenient. All the 0’s make it clearly obvious it was a lazy estimation.
That's incorrect. The study did NOT result in exactly .100000
You clearly don't understand how they came up with the .10 rule. The fastest possible reaction time was determined to be greater than .10, but it was rounded down to an even .10 just so someone couldn't calm that they had super human reaction time ability that was slightly less than the fastest human reaction time that they had recorded in their study.
It is so clear to just about everyone that this was arbitrary and wildly unfair
The rule isn't arbitrary. It's based on a scientific study.
And the rule wasn't arbitrarily applied to Devon Allen's race today. It's a rule that has been applied to thousands of races over dozens of years.
You are just now getting all excited over this rule because you didn't like who the rule applied to today. If it had applied to a no name runner from a no name country, you wouldn't have even bothered writing a post about it.
Is there some mathematical proof you can't start within .10? This is ridiculous?
It didn't look like he false started.
While I agree with you, the current false start rule has been in place for what...over 2 decades. .10 is the rule. He broke the rule...period.
I think we should use technology to see if anyone moves before the gun is fired. Allen moved 0.99 after the gun was fired. My opinion is that only runners who move before the gun should be DQ'd. Many would argue to go back to 2 false starts, then DQ.
As of today, he broke the rule and the rule is no false starts allowed.
Devon reacted .101 in the semis, you dont think he could go faster in a final? The dude is running the world champ final, in his home country, on his college track with a home crowd, running for his passed away father. He is MF wired and ready to go.
Track is the only sport in the world where if you commit the slightest penalty, you aren't even allowed to compete. What a joke.
I don't mind the rule. I'll take an electronic system over a human-judged one every time. Other sports have gone in the same direction (tennis line calls for instance).
Maybe the cut-off time needs to be tweeked, but that's a decision to be made with proper study and by experts - not because of American outrage on Twitter.
Other sport do have rules, but in tennis for example, if the ball hits the line, an official doesn't straight up kick you out of the match. No other sport does this. Maybe swimming?
Devon reacted .101 in the semis, you dont think he could go faster in a final? The dude is running the world champ final, in his home country, on his college track with a home crowd, running for his passed away father. He is MF wired and ready to go.
Lots of people sitting at home can come up with all kinds of theories, ideas, and hunches.
But this rule has been in place for many years, and in that entire time so far no one has come up with a scientifically valid reason to get rid of the rule.
Devon reacted .101 in the semis, you dont think he could go faster in a final? The dude is running the world champ final, in his home country, on his college track with a home crowd, running for his passed away father. He is MF wired and ready to go.
Lots of people sitting at home can come up with all kinds of theories, ideas, and hunches.
But this rule has been in place for many years, and in that entire time so far no one has come up with a scientifically valid reason to get rid of the rule.
These people came up with a scientifically valid reason to get rid of the rule.
"The current false start criterion used by the IAAF is based on an assumed minimum auditory reaction time. If an athlete moves sooner than 100ms after the start signal, he/she is deemed to have false-started. The purpose of this study, which was commissioned by the IAAF, was to examine neuromuscular reaction to the auditory signal used in the sprint start and to determine whether the 100ms limit is correct. Seven national-level Finnish sprinters took part. A comprehensive approach was used to study force reaction on the blocks, the movements of the arms and the activation profiles of several muscles. The authors found great variation in individual reaction times and confirmed previous reports of simple auditory reactions as fast as 80ms. They recommend that the 100ms limit be lowered to 80 or 85ms and that the IAAF urgently examines possibilities for detecting false starts kinematically, so that judges’ decisions are based on the first visible movement regardless of the body part. This can be done with a system of high-speed cameras, which gives views of all the athletes on the start line. With such a system, it would be possible to change the start rule so that no false starts are permitted."
Other sport do have rules, but in tennis for example, if the ball hits the line, an official doesn't straight up kick you out of the match.
A complete false equivalency.
In most sports, including tennis, basketball, baseball, football, hockey, etc. you get MANY chances before the end of the competition. Even in a field event, like shot put or long jump, you get multiple chances.
But in a running race you only get one chance. Surely you know this. So why bring up tennis when it's completely irrelevant?
In 1979 Renaldo Nehemiah ran this event in 13.00 - a world record. The event had been contested for eighty years or so and no one had ever run faster. It must be the limit of what a person could do. So if you ever run it faster, you must be cheating. But give the sport 0.05 seconds of error time. So make the fastest run humanly possible at 12.95. Anything faster is obviously cheating and you are disqualified.
One way to tell that the 0.100 rule is total bogus and that people can react slightly faster (or at least certain sensors register them reacting faster) is that there seem to be a slew of people hitting 0.08-0.09 reaction times, but not 0.01-0.04. Clearly a lot of those 0.08-0.09s are true reactions. How about that British sprinter who tweeted he’s 4x been above 0.097 but below 0.100? You’re telling me he’s *so good* at timing the gun that he jumps and almost hits it to the hundredth before actually hearing it? When the gun can take 1-3 seconds or more from ‘set’ to fire? Absolutely no chance, 0.003 is one one-thousandth of 3 seconds. That man can react in 0.09 or perhaps better, I have no doubt about it, and Devon Allen can clearly do better than 0.100 too (or you’re telling me he can do 0.100 exactly, the 0.101 wasn’t a jump, and he timed his 0.099 jump just one one-thousandth of a second off - give me a break!!!)
