Reaction Times Follow Up from Worlds....

They secretly turned off the sensor equipment alarm after Allen's race.

No, the reaction time problem was never fixed.

As the meet progressed I was checking out the reaction times for every sprint event including the 200, women's 100h, the 400's, and the relays. The was still an abnormally large amount of reaction times under .120 and an abnormally large amount of reaction times under .11.

The women's 100h alone had 6 or 7 women in the .100 to .109 range.

World Athletics claims there wasn't a problem, but they aren't stupid and know that there obviously was a problem.

They will probably fix it secretly and the next World Championships should be back to normal reaction times. And they won't ever admit there was a problem in Eugene with the reaction times.

Allen got fukked!

The Roots Tucker science if sport podcast covered this. And it was quite interesting. They discussed a study indicating 85ms might be a better limit.

It's NOT that people were reacting too quickly. The problem was that across the board for all events the reaction times were .02 faster than any previous World Championships or Olympics. Which means the reaction time system was wrong. And they never fixed it.

You give them too much credit.

So basically you get penalized for being perfect.....yea thats good for the sport.

I believe that people have gotten better. The overall sprint times were the fastest in history.

The entire false start system needs to be reworked, including video proof of a false start for big meets like this. They also need to find out why this year everyone was so fast. It was obviously a technical problem, not a fast start problem.

Are all the blocks exactly the same? Is there measurement error within the system? If so, how much error? Are all the blocks calibrated before each race or do they need to be?

It would be interesting to know if the overall sprint times were more than 0.02 faster on average, or if the improvement could be entirely attributed to the faster reaction times.

Yeah all the blocks at the world champs are the same. Not sure of exactly what the error will be, but all electronic systems have error. However, if they’re quoting times to the thousandth of a second in terms of precision, then the error would have to be less than +- 0.0005s. According to world athletics, all the blocks are calibrated at a lab in Germany prior to the start of the champs, and have been for the past few champs. They don’t need to be recalibrated between races (according to WA).

I thought about that too. Is the .02 deduction only effecting the reaction times? Or are the total times also being deducted by .02?

For most races it doesn't matter, but there is a world record (pending ratification) in the women's 100h where getting the exact time correct matters.

Definitely. I think people tend to forget the payday too for these athletes. He would have surely been at least second which was $35,000. $70,000 for first. Pretty good chunk change, plus contract bonuses and such. He could have a case for a lawsuit .

His agent said that they are considering a lawsuit.

he certainly had a good shot at top 2, but he was only 3rd at USAs, thousandths away from not making the team. nothings a sure thing.

have other meets at oregon this year had fast reaction times? were these the same blocks as pre and ncaas?

No these are different blocks/different timing system/different everything than what Hayward usually uses. Shoot, even a different sponsor!

After reviewing that start a dozen times, even in slow motion, you cant see Allen move at all before the race and surely not faster then anyone else.