I was actually unaware but just read that when Bolt set the current 100m world record he actually ran 9.572 but athletics rules state it had to be rounded up to 9.58. Does anyone know why that rule is in place? Any second grade student knows that 0.5 or above is rounded up and below 0.5 rounds down. Just seems an absurd rule to have in place.
If somebody was to run 9.569, he will break the world record.
Whereas with your method they won’t. Despite being objectively faster.
Thats why it’s calculated this way?
I see what you’re saying but they have really just tried to reinvented math. It should really be that the 9.569 equals the record of 9.572 given that records are measured to the 100th of a second.
I was actually unaware but just read that when Bolt set the current 100m world record he actually ran 9.572 but athletics rules state it had to be rounded up to 9.58. Does anyone know why that rule is in place? Any second grade student knows that 0.5 or above is rounded up and below 0.5 rounds down. Just seems an absurd rule to have in place.
They are rounded by track convention, not by standard mathematical convention, so anything over an exact centisecond is rounded up to the next one, and there’s no rounding down.
As for why, it’s a convention is all. One could equally well ask why is it’s okay to give Bolt the 0.002s benefit when he didn’t run under them.
rounded clearly is not the right word. Maybe truncated to 2 decimal places but no faster than actual time? So 9.570 is reported to be 9.57, but as pointed out 9.571is reported to be 9.58
It’s rounded UP. Not rounded down, not rounded to the nearest…rounded UP. OP even says in the title “rounded up”. And guess what, on every single planet it would round UP to .58.
It's not rounding, it's more like a ceiling function or operation, which maps x to the smallest integer greater than or equal to x. In this case, it's not an integer but hundredths of a second.
Since thousandths of a second are used to determine winners when hundredths cannot differentiate between runners, all world records should be measured in thousandths of a second.
This post was edited 2 minutes after it was posted.
Why are you hung up on rounding? The fact of the matter is, when the clock hit 9.57, he hadn't yet crossed the line. In what world should he be credited with running a 9.57? When it hit 9.58, he had crossed the line. His finishing time was 9.58.
Correct. I can't get my assistant coach to understand this when we take splits in relays. Maybe we should just round someone to 10 seconds when they run 10.123 because we should round down to rhe nearest second.
What's weirder is the rules for the roads. When Ritz ran 59:59.5 or some tenth of a second over 59 seconds, it was turned into 1:00:00. By that standard, Usain Bolt's time would have been 10 flat.