DEVON ALLEN ROBBBED. .09999?

Can you imagen if, in addition to Devon Allen, Fred Kerley and Christian Coleman had also been DQ'd? There would have been a lot of pissed off people if all three had been kicked out.

Eugene really needs to fix their reaction time system BEFORE the 200m starts.

You have never watched swimming then.

The big difference is because he was the 4th person DQ'd by what has now been determined to be a faulty reaction time system.

He didn't actually false start. His reaction time wasn't actually .099. It's a technology error.

Just checked some previous World Champs results

M 100m Heats average reaction time

London 2017 0.153

Doha 2019 0.162

Oregon 2022 0.132

I'm not sure you can say which is right or wrong but it seems clear that there is a systematic difference.

That we've, ultimately, taken human judgment out of the false start system by insisting that some technology (built, like all technology, by fallible humans and subject to malfunction) can tell us to the millisecond when a guy pushed off, and that we won't be reasonable but will insist that a .001 difference according to said technology (built by fallible humans and potentially malfunctioning) MUST be treated as a violation...

...is a sign to me that maybe the whole "one and done" FS rule isn't fit for purpose anymore. I don't even care if they go back to "everyone gets two" since the former "first one's on the field, one and done after that" was also unfair and led to unnecessary gamesmanship with purposeful false starting to take away the freebie. The schedule at worlds isn't so tight that it can't handle a couple of extra false starts if they happen. Giving everyone a second chance will massively decrease the necessity that the tech be absolutely perfect, because the likelihood of hitting the gun .001 "too early" is vanishingly small. You can't completely eliminate the possibility that it would happen, but it'd be darn rare. It will also, ultimately, let the world title be decided by the athletes, not officials and tech.

And if you look at any other World Championships or Olympics you'll see that the reaction times are in the .15 to .16 range, vs Eugene's .132 reaction time.

Please there are A LOT of Eugene reaction times under .12, which at most meets is very rare. And some even .105-ish and in theory humans can't react that fast.

Maybe Allen just broke the equivalent of the sub 4 mile in reaction time. His prize was a DQ.

Let's use some basic critical thinking....

1st time Worlds are in the US

Devon Allen's alma mater is hosting

Bunch of press pre-race about him and his father

He recently ran the 3rd fastest time history, setting the stage for a possible WR attempt

That's simply not true. An IAAF study back in 2009 concluded that 0.08 was possible (even if it was rare).

The answer, it seems to me, is that it would make sense to award a yellow card to athletes with a 0.08 to 0.1s reaction time, and if they repeat it then DQ.

There has to be a cut off somewhere, and every human will be slightly different.

All that is true.

AND ALSO because the reaction time system that Eugene installed for the world championships isn't working correctly. It's making people's reaction times .02 faster than they really are. Devon Allen's reaction time wasn't actually .099, so he shouldn't have been DQ'd.

I'm fine with your suggestion. But if you look back over the last 4 or 5 world championships, you'll notice that there are very few reaction times under .12, and very, very few under .11, while Eugene has had a lot of reaction times that fast.

The problem here is not whether Devon Allen reacted too fast or not. He didn't.

The problem is that the reaction time system that Eugene installed for the World Championships isn't working properly and it is incorrectly recording reaction times .02 faster than they really are, which is how 4 people got DQ'd for a supposed .09x reaction time.

If it's possible, then make it legal, not a yellow card/DQ if repeated - why DQ high performance? Think, man! Anyway, they need to focus on the faulty equipment first.

We have to remember what sprinting was like before the rules; lots of false starts and delayed meets. Terrible for both the athletes and the spectators, and the networks especially hated it. This may seem unfair, but we're always going to have to draw a line somewhere.

I feel bad for Devon but everyone competes under the same rules.

Just to get you up to speed, it turns out that Devon Allen didn't false start after all. The new reaction time system that Eugene installed for the world championships is faulty. It's reducing everyone's reaction time by .02.

No need for a scientific reason: the gun says you can start racing, he moved after the gun went off, so no false start. It really shouldn’t matter if he “anticipated” the gun as long as he stays still UNTILL the gun goes off

It seems extremely likely that the threshold force that triggers the reaction time reading from the blocks is too low at these championships. Possibly a manufacturing error, field calibration error, or they're using the female threshold setting on all the starting blocks. Can anyone confirm if female reaction times are also statistically improbably fast across the board so far?

Seems like it's been known forever that reaction times <.1 are physically possible, but it's never been an issue because no one was ever close using the equipment and system in place. I don't know where to find troves of reaction time data, but from some available articles, it seems like .14-.15 with a std dev of .01 is the norm for elite sprints. The number of reaction times right above or just below .10 seem extremely unlikely. It's staggering that whoever is in charge of managing equipment and timing didn't catch on immediately.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that 0.999* is, mathematically speaking, exactly the same as 1.0.

Does swimming have a reaction time factor off the blocks? those are electronic as well