
Why There Are So Many Ties in Swimming - azylman
http://regressing.deadspin.com/this-is-why-there-are-so-many-ties-in-swimming-1785234795
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lpolovets
The article says the tolerance is "3 centimeters in each lane," which feels
surprisingly high. The longest race is the men's 1500m freestyle, which is 30
lengths of a 50m pool. That means that in the worst case, pool dimension
errors can add 0.9m to someone's race -- about half a second of time in the
1500m. I bet there are races where 0.5 seconds makes a big difference.

~~~
throwaway287391
You got me thinking about what other factors could affect the result at
various degrees of precision. By my math [1], the time it takes for the sound
of the starting buzzer to reach the ears of swimmers at opposite ends of the
pool could actually affect the outcome measured in hundredths of a second. But
it's an order of magnitude smaller effect than the lane lengths varying by
3cm. Of course, they could remedy this (and for all I know, maybe they do!) by
having one starting buzzer speaker placed at the same distance behind each
swimmer.

[1] Each lane is 2.13m wide, so the swimmers in lanes #1 and #8 are 14.91m
apart. If the buzzer were placed right next to swimmer 1, it would take
~0.044s longer to reach swimmer 8's ear (using 340.29 m/s as the speed of
sound). Or if it were right in the middle between swimmers 4 & 5, it would
reach swimmers 4 & 5 ~0.019s before it reached 1 & 8.

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chroma
For both swimming and track events, each starting block has a speaker to
broadcast the gun sound. In the 2012 Olympics, the starting gun was replaced
with a fully electronic device.[1]

1\. [http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-
sp...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/the-speed-of-
sound-is-too-slow-for-olympic-athletes/260413/)

~~~
throwaway287391
Ah, cool, thanks for filling me in on that. The fact that the organizers
indeed go to that length/expense to remove the ~0.02s advantage a swimmer
would otherwise have due to the speed of sound makes it even stranger to me
that they'd accept a 3cm difference between lanes, which seems to have an
order of magnitude larger effect in long races (per OP's calculations).

I'd also wonder if there isn't some advantage/disadvantage to being one of the
two swimmers on either end (#1 or #8) versus any of the others (#2-7) which
each have two swimmers on either side of them. I have no idea which way the
effect would go, but it would seem to me that there must be some effect at the
level of hundredths or thousandths of seconds. Edit: seems there's indeed an
advantage to being in the inner lanes, and they account for it by seeding [1].
(This was probably well known to anyone who pays any attention to or knows
anything about competitive swimming at all. :)

[1] [https://www.quora.com/In-competitive-swimming-why-are-the-
in...](https://www.quora.com/In-competitive-swimming-why-are-the-inner-
lanes-3-4-and-5-usually-the-fastest-Do-better-swimmers-qualify-to-get-them-Is-
there-an-advantage-And-if-so-how-is-that-fair)

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sytelus
The question to ask is why so many races end up so close that we need
millisecond precision? For races that end so close, I suspect winner is
determined by random chance instead of true differentiation. The length of
pool precision is not real concern but rather the possibility that we are
hitting human + tech ceiling in this particular sport.

~~~
sevenless
Well yes, but Olympic athletes and audiences tend not to like it very much if
we try to do 50 replicates of the same race.

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Qantourisc
No-one is concerned about all the water vortices created in the pool by your
competitors ? I suspect these would also add quite a bit of unfairness.

~~~
niftich
It's not clear whether lane placement affects results, but it's true that the
middle lanes are often favored, and qualification systems tend to place
better-performing swimmers towards the middle. Here's two non-professional
discussions on the matter:

[1] [https://www.quora.com/In-competitive-swimming-why-are-the-
in...](https://www.quora.com/In-competitive-swimming-why-are-the-inner-
lanes-3-4-and-5-usually-the-fastest-Do-better-swimmers-qualify-to-get-them-Is-
there-an-advantage-And-if-so-how-is-that-fair)

[2] [http://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/1326/in-
swimming-i...](http://sports.stackexchange.com/questions/1326/in-swimming-is-
there-a-competitive-advantage-to-being-in-one-lane-or-another)

~~~
Qantourisc
I was more thinking along the lines of random-currents-bad-luck though. Al
tough the out most lanes might have a small effect.

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maxander
Its utterly mind-blowing that humans of different races, with vastly different
life histories and training regimens, competing in a sport with tremendous
physical complexity, can wind up with performance equal to each other, to the
limits of our ability to measure it.

There's still _some_ important lesson in the Olympics, despite everything.

~~~
Someone
But we could fairly easily measure it; we just don't find it worth the
trouble.

Also, as to the ties, that's almost purely a political choice made by the
sporting body. In rowing, for example, the winner in the Olympic final was
decided by looking at the finish photo
([http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/13/theres-only-
one-g...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/13/theres-only-one-gold-
after-5000ths-of-a-second-divides-dead-heat/)), with both rowers getting the
same time in hundreds of a second.

I doubt they can align six boats to that precision at the start, even with
equipment for holding the bows of the boats at the starting line.

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vilhelm_s
> a thousandth-of-a-second constitutes 2.39 millimeters of travel. FINA pool
> dimension regulations allow a tolerance of 3 centimeters in each lane, _more
> than ten times_ that amount. [emphasis added]

So by the same argument, they should not measure hundredths either...

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matheweis
Eh, anything less than 0.0125s is 3cm and a tie. Pretty darn close to 0.01s
and all you need to do is make sure the pool is accurate to within 2.3cm
instead...

Much more interesting to think about the delta between the clock that's
accurate to hundredths.

Someone could win with a time of 23.01s vs second places 23.00s... But is the
delta really 0.01s, or was second place 23.00999999 with a delta of
0.00000001s?

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quickben
Well, from my experience, back in my youth, you actually have to _hit_ the
board or it wouldn't register touch in so many cases. Then you have to rely on
whoever is making the manual measurements for corrections and that is messy.

Not every swimming competition can blow cash on slow motion photo finish
cameras. I guess the rules are in place to make most for most swimmers.

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bkjelden
I think another thing worth mentioning is that ties don't really seem to have
a negative perception in swimming.

None of the swimmers involved in the ties mentioned seemed to feel that their
medals were delegitimized or somehow worth less because of the tie.

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mhb
Why don't they apply this same reasoning to rowing races in which the inter-
lane variations can be much, much bigger than the margin between finishers?

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ForFreedom
Will someone explain the below in simple terms?

"In a 50 meter Olympic pool, at the current men’s world record 50m pace, a
thousandth-of-a-second constitutes 2.39 millimeters of travel. FINA pool
dimension regulations allow a tolerance of 3 centimeters in each lane, more
than ten times that amount. Could you time swimmers to a thousandth-of-a-
second? Sure, but you couldn’t guarantee the winning swimmer didn’t have a
thousandth-of-a-second-shorter course to swim."

~~~
detaro
If you measure the time the swimmers take very precisely and thus can tell
that one swimmer reached the target a few milliseconds earlier, that could be
because they are a faster swimmer than the second-placed. Or they could just
have had a shorter lane to swim and win despite being slightly slower than the
other. They swim around 2.39 mm per ms, and lane differences are allowed to be
up to 3 cm, so this can make ~12 ms difference where you don't know where it
is from.

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ForFreedom
Technically a lane cant be shorter in a swimming pool.

~~~
detaro
why not? The regulation only allows them to be longer than the specified lane
length, yes, but that still means that one lane can be shorter than another.

