Is this site dead?

I know, I shouldn't have used this title. When a site stops updating, this is a bad sign. Sometimes it may mean that something bad happened to its curator. When this is the case, using a title like the one of this post is politically incorrect. But on the other hand, the title means what is says, so...

I am talking here about the site maintained by P. Larsson and which is devoted to the all-time athletics performances. It has literally thousands of performances and is a real treasure-trove for athletics' fans. Curiously I have never given a link to that site in my blog. 

The bad news is that since the end of October the site is not updated any more. I tried to find a reference to Peter Larsson on the web, one related to athletics, but without success. Given the regularity with which he was updating his site, the fact that he has been silent for more than three months is a bad omen. And once a site is not maintained any more its days are counted. This may take months or years but at some point the entire site disappears. Fearing this, I did, as a preventive measure, download the whole site. This is dead-easy given the simple text-based structure of the site. So the archives are secure with me although I am perfectly aware that they will become outdated really fast.

Clicking on everything that was active on Larsson's page I ended up on the Trackinsun blog. And I must admit that I felt a bit ashamed. That blog gives results, in almost real time, of athletics performances from all over the world. And they have been doing this for the past ten years. And I was ignoring its very existence! How can one consider oneself an athletics fan and have spurned (albeit involuntarily) such a great athletics results' site? Well, now, along with myself, you know of its existence. So do not forget to bookmark the page. 

An excellent initiative of WA: week-end reads

I have usually a highly critical attitude towards the IAAF, sorry, World Athletics. (I guess that I will end up by getting accustomed to the new name. But it may take some more time). My position became even stronger in the post-Coe era. One expects a champion with an almost legendary status, like sir Sebastian, to be more daring in modernising athletics. But this not the story I am going to tell today.

The site of WA (yes, this is the abbreviation for World Athletics) has been recently revamped. There were some bloopers in the very first days but by now everything functions smoothly. One new feature that I liked a lot are the Weekend Reads.

They present a collection of articles on athletics from the past seven days. The choice is excellent and the accompanying illustrations of great taste. Of course nothing is 100 % OK. First, just try to find the Weekend Reads on the site of WA. The search leads you nowhere. I had to ask Google to locate the page for me. Just so that you will not have to do the same, here is a link to the page. It is well hidden inside the lifestyle pages, themselves being part of Be Active. Go figure. 

Second, there does not seem to be an archive of the previous editions of Weekend Reads. Once the week is gone, the collection vanishes into thin air. This is really a pity. 

Forget Bubka, forget Lavillenie. Pole vault has just one name: Duplantis

Last week, jumping in Düsseldorf,  Duplantis put the bar at 6.17 m, one cm higher than the record of R. Lavillenie. He missed, on his second attempt, by a hair-breadth and thus during the whole week, while waiting for the Torun competition, there were many references to the "almost world record" of Duplantis. I would have been really disappointed had the matter stayed there. Duplantis could not be just the guy who has threatened the world record. The world record was his to take and he did this in an impressive way in Torun.

After a first jump where he brushed the bar with his thigh on the way up he had an almost perfect second one and passed over the bar, making history. 

I have been following Duplantis for quite a few years. He began setting age group records at age seven.  If you wish to understand how a 20 years old guy breaks the world record, just watch this video. 

Mondo said that he was very happy to succeed R. Lavillenie in the list of world record holders. “Growing up, Renaud was my absolute idol”, he said. “The support he's given me through this whole process too, has been phenomenal”. And Mondo, who began vaulting when he was four years old, added:
“Ever since I was three years old, four years old, this was the goal. I wanted to break the world record. I wanted to win all the gold medals there are to win, but one of the biggest goals, maybe the biggest, was breaking the world record". B. Marsak, writing for World Athletics remarks, "that Duplantis would one day succeed Lavillenie carried an air of inevitability".

What I really liked was the explosion of joy of his co-vaulters. Seeing Duplantis carried on the shoulders of Karalis and Wojciechowski was a great moment.

And when asked whether he can go higher, Duplantis did not hesitate: “Sure. If I feel good, why not go to 6.18?” In fact for somebody with his talent, sky is the limit.

PS. One week later he did just that, jumping a 6.18 m WR.

Imperative changes: automatic timing

One thing that has been bothering me since a long, long time are those pesky milliseconds, used in order to classify the athletes. I have already written a post on the absurdity of milliseconds. What does a millisecond mean in practice? Let us assume that a runner moves at a velocity of 10 m/s. In this case a millisecond corresponds to a distance of 1 cm. This means that when two athletes are separated by one millisecond their physical distance is just one centimetre. I am ready to concede the fact that the human eye is able to assess a 1 cm distance on the photo finish cliché. Where the things become fuzzy is when one reads carefully the rules which stipulate that

The time shall be taken to the moment at which any part of the body of an athlete (i.e. torso, as distinguished from the head, neck, arms, legs, hands or feet) reaches the vertical plane of the nearer edge of the finish line.

The catch word is "neck". Where does the torso end and the neck start? Can one define this with a sub-centimetric precision? What I suspect is that every photo-finish judge has his own definition of what is the neck and while he may apply it consistently in his analyses the choice may be different from that of other judges. And this is not something innocuous. The IAAF/WA is now using milliseconds in order to establish the classification of athletes competing in different series. Thus a difference in the interpretation of the photo-finish may have as a consequence the unfair elimination of an athlete from a final. I repeat that I am not criticising here the technology of the photo-finish. Modern cameras are recording with more than 10000 frames per second, so the accuracy of the final photo is perfect. What I am worried about is the human factor.

A finish Lynx camera capture

We cannot keep depending on the vagaries of human-eye interpretations. Definitely something must be done. The timing should be completely automatic, without any human intervention. What could be a solution? The current athletics rules allow for a timing provided by a transponder system but only for races not held completely in the stadium. The transponder- or chip-timing is working on a radio-frequency identification (RFID) protocol. A passive, for running events, transponder is attached to the athlete. It captures electromagnetic energy produced by a nearby source and emits a unique code. The latter is detected by strategically placed antennas and makes possible to obtain the moment at which the athlete crosses the finish line.

A chip by Innovative Timing Systems

How could such a system be implemented in the stadium? I looked around for available timing chips and it turns out that there are several, some of which can be read at speeds of more than 40 m/s and at distances of several metres. They are small, a few centimetres across and I am convinced that producing smaller ones could be possible. So let us assume that we have a timing chip in the form of a small disk with a 2 cm diameter. Such a system could be easily attached by an adhesive on the sternum of the athlete just at the top of the breastbone. What is then needed is that the chip be detected when the athlete crosses the finish line. I believe that such a thing is technically possible. It can, of course, be used in conjunction with the existing photo-finish system, the latter offering a back-up in case of failure of the chip-timing.

Speaking of possible failures I am aware of the fact that no system is totally foolproof. Chips, in particular mass-produced ones, will definitely have a finite failure rate. We can imagine chips being tested before use as an elementary precaution. Also radio waves can be perturbed and often are. Thus a chip may fail to activate at the finish line. Having more antennas can mitigate this problem (but at an additional cost). But these are practical problems for which one expects to have practical solutions. It is my opinion that it is high time the IAAF/WA decided to go this way, dispensing with the human-curated photo-finish.

Imperative changes

For quite some time now I have been planning to write a series of articles on the changes that I consider absolutely essential for athletics. It is really bizarre that while other sports do not hesitate to introduce ground-breaking rule modifications, the athletics policy-makers are way too timid and contend themselves with just small, incremental, changes. One excellent example is the question of making a tabula rasa of records. Everybody agrees that our current list of world (and continental) records is tainted by performances registered in the era when doping controls were, if not inexistent, at least inefficient. Still, since erasing records established before any date would have some current record holders protest vehemently (which, by the way, they did) the current attitude is to close eyes and hope that one day all those old records will go away.

Race-walkers or race runners?

One good example of reluctance to introduce changes is that of race-walking. It is clear to everybody that race-walkers are running. However the judges' eyes cannot always catch the violation of the rules. So, instead of deciding to use the help of technology it was decided that what the eye cannot see does not constitute a violation. (And, yes, there has been talk about a chip which could detect irregularities in walking, to be worn in the race-walker shoes, but I will believe it when I see it). 

J. Gray, US record holder, competing in the decathlon

Another great example of a missed opportunity was that of women's decathlon. After having introduced it officially 15 years ago, the IAAF decided to forget about it so as not to displease the current heptathlon champions. Thus we are stuck with a combined event for women which allows athletes to shine without becoming real combined-event specialists. And all this while there is an incessant talk about men-women parity.

Four articles are planned for the "imperative changes" series. They will deal with automatic timing, the women's high-hurdles height, the horizontal jumps take-off board and finally wind measurements.  They will most probably appear in this order but it is not at all clear whether they will be published in succession.