I need and will pay a stats guy to compare reaction times of Tokyo 2021 vs Eugene 2022.

23 posts for the first person to make sense, whicvh is why you don't let stats people tell you why something happenned. They just mine data without any common sense.

On the very first day of competion I mentioned to a fellow athletics purist, that 'finally' we have a championship race with a set-go gap that seems 'correct' and/or consistent, because you can notice it from the quality of the starts. A better reaction time is a consequence of this, but it has the one drawback of 'predictability' for someone having gone through heats.

You cannot just compare Eugene to Doha to Tokyo or whatever, it might give 'beautiful curves' to a sex starved nerd, but is meaningless out of context with different human beings in control

What you could also do, but not necessarily get answers from, is times in finals vs times in heats for same athletes, different events/starters etc, amount of false starts across different starters...there's a host of other stuff that come into play.

I thought they could let him go under protest and work it out later, but that brings its own issues.

Are you implying that you are a 'stats guy'?

Yes, the set-to-gun timing is perfect for the sprints👍👍👍👍👍👍. Noticed it immediately, because of course I do simulated starts while watching 😂.

Although such perfection might lower RT’s, it doesn’t excuse the failure of the official to properly exercise discretion based on all available evidence to determine a false start and/or ejection from the race.

Lol @ Internet stats guys. You can't just take a data set without all of the context and make overarching conclusions. Are the starts statistically in control for this event by itself? (I haven't looked, maybe they are). That MIGHT indicate at least a consistent timing system and environment for the timing system. Are the athlete's deviations from their meet averages in control compared to other meets? Another indication the timing system is at least consistent. Moving on to the meet... Many things could be a cause if there is nothing wrong with the timing system. I mean, the possibilities are nearly limitless, but everybody who knows almost nothing wants to immediately jump to conclusions without a real investigation.

You lost that bet. You should read more, before making posts like this.

As mentioned a number of times already in the last 24 hours, the starting system they are using at Worlds this year is different than what they used at Hayward in the past, different from what they used at NCAAs this year, and different than what they used at USA's this year.

So no, it hadn't malfunction in the past because it hadn't been used in the past.

World Athletics won't allow a real investigation. They issued a statement yesterday saying that it's up to the officials to determine if the sub .100 reaction times are worth a DQ or not. What a joke!

World Athletics needs to stop putting the blame on the officials and fix the timing system!

It’s not a joke at all. In fact WA is absolutely correct.

THE SENSOR SYSTEM IS NOT TO BE CONSIDERED DISPOSITIVE OF THE ISSUE OF A FALSE START.

If there was no indication on the video of a voluntary running movement that triggered the timer, that was meaningfully different from the movements of other athletes, and especially if other officials had been consulted and concurred, then IMO the official failed to properly exercise his discretion, using all the evidence available to him.

Think of it this way: what if every reading was below the threshold? The official would likely not DQ everyone. What about 7/8? 5/8? 3/8? See, the thing is that each athlete has an independent pressure sensor. The video is superior for many reasons, including that one single system records and displays data from all athletes simultaneously. The force sensors should absolutely never be dispositive, especially in close cases—and it doesn’t get any closer than this.

This, along with other FS other than Alfred, was an officiating failure, plain and simple—but it is fixable, RIGHT NOW.

I'm implying that I'm smart enough to run basic tests to figure out if something is amiss in Eugene. Answer it is:

And Iv'e run my own numbers comparing the men's and women's 200s from 2022 to 2019.

You can see that here.

docs.google.com

Comparison of Reaction Times In of 1st Rounds 200s at Worlds - 2019 vs 2022

200s 1st Round eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee 200 Reaction Times Men's 200 in ms,200 Reaction Times Women's 200 in ms 25 Fastest Reaction Times,

Open link

Summarized here:

letsrun.com

The Data Keeps Pouring In and It Continues To Look Bad For World Athletics and Great For Devon Allen

Robert Johnson

Another sprint even has largely been run since the Devon Allen DQ and the men's and women's 200 data shows that something is amiss with the start reaction times in Eugene.

Open link

The fact that every single sprint event, hell every single round of every sprint event is recording faster reaction times in 2022 as compared to 2019 shows that something is drastically different.

outed by rojo, how embarasing

“Something” yes, but it doesn’t have to be that the machines are faulty.

I do expect WA will revise the 0.1s threshold in the next couple years of so after completing its own commissioned study with a larger pool of elite athletes similar in spirit to the original Finnish study.

NO you're not. If you're smart enough then why didn't you do it to begin with? And did you ever pay for OTHER PEOPLE looking up data? $100 you didn't

Here's the deal: the only things rojo is "smart enough" for is dubyaing his way through life, hourly naps and TV watching.

Relax. He said he was busy with the women's marathon and doing interviews. That's why he wanted help.

I am JC100, who did the charts on the T&FN forum, in this thread.

I have been continuing to update the data a few hours after the events happen.

A post here compares the RTs across the major championships, and includes the RTs from the Prefontaine Classic in 2021 and 2022, held in Eugene, which are also in line with previous major championships, with the 2022 WC the big outlier.

If the starter at the Pre Classic was also an American style 'fast starter', then the argument around the speed of the gun after 'set' loses its force. I don't think the 'fast gun' argument is particularly strong anyway, but in order for it to work, the starter at the 2021 and 2022 Pre needs to have been a European style slow starter and at the 2022 WC a much faster starter.

While this is obviously possible, we are getting into unlikely territory now, with a much stronger probability that the equipment is calibrated differently. For example, a reaction which in all other meets would have been recorded as a 0.113 is here being recorded as a 0.099. That is, something is different in the way all of the electronic signals from the gun and the pressure plates are being synchronized together.

An open question is if this change is deliberate (perhaps in the aim to increase the chance of a world record) or if it is a mistake. I am inclined to the latter, because deliberate fiddling is such a ridiculous idea. But the evidence seems strong that this is some kind of calibration issue.

Looking at the WA statement on the blocks, they seem to be making the astounding admission that the calibration of the blocks is NOT checked again after they have made the trip to Eugene from having gone through 'rigorous testing' in Germany. If so, this is really amateurish.

In 2009, the IAAF commissioned a study to look at the reaction time (auditory).

The researchers found that the reaction time was not 0.10 as indicated from a study from 60 years ago, but actually 0.080

Changing the IAAF Reaction Time Rule (Part 2) (speedendurance.com)

Is this the study based entirely on looking at only seven Finnish non-elite athletes?

I may be going out on a limb here, but nearly 2000 reaction times over 25 years from elite athletes running in actual major championships would seem to be a more credible dataset.

The 2022 World Championships is the odd one out - something is being done differently. These are largely the same runners as were at Tokyo, Doha and the 2021 and 2022 Pre meets, where the reaction times were all pretty consistent.

The question is not if the current rules need to be revised. The question is why 2022 WC is so different from every other major (and perhaps every other meet) in all of history.

LRC Note: We have closed this thread to new posts and have started a new thread on the matter where everyone talks about the Eugene reaction times moving forward.