On Track Night Vienna Starts 800s from 400 starting point - 4 world championship qualifiers are invalidated!!

Thats crazy. It’s no surprise that such fast times were run: the athletes in the outer lanes run more than 10 meters too little when the start is at the 400m line, that’s over a second difference.

It’s a 1-turn stagger…what’s even the possible line to screw up with. There’s no race that has a mid-turn break.

EDIT: oh you’re saying they started at the 2-turn stagger line…wild if true. Huge advantage for outer lanes, got video?

They ran one turn in lanes before cutting in, like a typical 800m. However, they started at the 400m start lines instead of the 800m ones. The 400m marks are much farther apart because they account for the second turn as well, in the outer lane, that’s about 15 meters. You can watch the footage on the livestream from Track Night (see Instagram); the outer lanes were clearly ahead when cutting in.

It’s clearly visible in the video. They started at the white 400m lines, and they’re standing awkwardly far apart from eachother for an 800m start. Strange that no one seems to notice.

Yeah it being a rudimentary 6-lane track threw me off. Most new high school tracks have 800 lettering on the track and the numbers at the 400m stagger, as well as a 4x400 triple stagger marked. Track probably shouldn’t be certified for a professional event.

Only for the women's A race (the dead last 800m run) they understood the problem and changed the startlines, you can clearly see the differences (the men cutted a LOT). Sad.

You see a lady move the lane number box behind the correct line. Then the next we see they’ve moved behind the line to the correct start LOL. WA will invalidate the results right?

Very unfortunate that only someone from the last heat noticed it. And yes, of course, deleting the results is the only option in this situation.

Look at the results (click on "ZL"). Nearly everyone is listed as a DQ

Having a car on the track didn't help matters, either. I saw a runner gesturing at the finish line that the car caused a problem with the narrowing after the break point.

They DQed everyone except those who started in the first lane (and except women's A race).

This happened to me in 7th grade. When I pointed it out before my race, the officials (aka the music teacher and the PE teacher) said it was too late to change since they had already run a couple heats. Crazy this could happen in a real meet...

Imagine qualifying for worlds but not really.

What an awful mistake - it's about a 3.8 meter distance which at that speed is around half a second give or take.

I have to be honest though - how did none of those athletes pick up on this and say "this is the wrong start line, we need to change it". To be at that level surely it's not your first rodeo - you know when you are out there on the track that guy in the lane outside of you shouldn't be 7+ meters ahead of you - you should basically be able to step forward and touch them. This is insane to me.

It’s a lot more than 3.8m. Each lane out, the advantage increases in distance. Lane 6 is around a 19m advantage. You need to account for running the whole turn on the second bend. The 3.8m (3.840m) is only for lane 2.

Lane 6 for example. The 800m start is 19.34m and the 400m start is 38.32m. If you don’t believe me, just go to the track and see how far the 400m start is actually ahead of the 800m.

Roughly for each lane; 3.8, 7.6, 11.5, 15.4 and 19.3 advantage.

It looks like the markings for the 100m are messy and overlap with the 800m start marks. There was also a promotional car and fencing(??) in the middle of the back straight which is nuts with a 6 lane track and doubling athletes in lanes!

To be fair to the athletes, when you run the European races, the lines, colors and markings are often slightly different across the countries, so I think it's normal to not question as much when you're used to switching across countries that are smaller than most US states. Only when you see it zoomed out on the video now, the stagger looks obviously awkward in hindsight, but in the moment, I can see how the athletes wouldn't notice. This is on the officials imo.

This happened one time when I was coaching. They were lining the 4X400 on the 400 meter line (2-turn stagger vs 3-turn stagger). It was quickly caught by coaches and athletes and fixed. What I don't understand is how 7 sections could be run without any athlete or coach noticing. It's not like this was the first rodeo for all of them.