The 110 m hurdles race final in the recent Oregon-22 World Championships was marred by a no-show (of none other than the current olympic champion H. Parchment) and two disqualifications. S. Brathwaite was disqualified after the race: he hit the 6th hurdle, lost his equilibrium and could not jump over the 7th one. Unfortunately for him, he was fighting for the bronze medal at that moment. But what came as a shock was the disqualification of D. Allen for false start. Allen had run an amazing 12.84 s in June (third performance ever) making him de facto a favourite for a medal, a medal that had barely escaped him in the Tokyo Olympics the previous year. Allen protested and I was intrigued by the fact that he insisted even after he was shown his anticipated start. And then people started talking about what happened, I went back to the official results and the explanation was waiting there. Once again, the witless insistence of World Athletics to attribute credibility to milliseconds was the culprit. Before I give any analysis, please look at the video and see for yourselves what is taking place.
Can you assert that Allen anticipated his start? Certainly not. Now, please have a look at the official results. The technical rule in question states that there is a false start when the reaction time of the athlete is less than 0.100 second. (The three decimal places would imply, at least to my physicist's eye, that a precision of a millisecond is taken into account in the reaction-time measurement). And Allen's reaction time was 0.099 s, one millisecond smaller than the accepted one.
Now, some specialists claimed that the cut-off has to be somewhere and if the reaction-time is below the cut-off then there is a false start. There are two answers to this. The first had to do with the "below the cut-off" and the second with the "cut-off" itself. The automatic system for the detection of the reaction time is a physical apparatus and, as such, prone to measurement errors. Obviously the apparatus is calibrated at the beginning of the competition and probably regularly checked. But is there any guarantee that the measurements are systematically precise with a precision better than 0.001 s, throughout the competition? I seriously doubt that. Believing that an apparatus always gives accurate answers is something that would garner a "fail" for any Physics student. And World Athletics does just this: they tell the judges to close their eyes and believe whatever number the apparatus is spewing out.
At this point you may ask yourself what is there to be done if we start mistrusting the accuracy of the apparatuses. I will come back to this in a moment but, before, let us see what happened in Allen's semifinal. Here are the official results.
And this time Allen's reaction time was 0.101 s. Since it was above 0.1 s everything was OK. So the first conclusion is that Allen is a great starter. But is he the only one? P.J. Vazel made an interesting study and it turns out that the number of excellent starters is increasing. And the rules must take this into account.
The problem is that the 100 ms cut-off is a convention based on competition recordings performed in the 60s and not a scientific finding. It was adopted by the IAAF in 1989 and is remains in effect since then. Is World Athletics aware of the problem? Absolutely. In fact a IAAF-sponsored study by a Finnish team showed that auditory reactions can be as fast as 80 ms. They concluded that the cut-off time for false starts should be lowered to 80 or 85 ms. In an independent study Van Hooren reached the conclusion that, theoretically, it is possible to react within 84 ms to the start signal and, while it takes longer to exert the necessary pressure (25 kg of force) in order to trigger the start detection plate, reaction times faster than 100 ms are physiologically possible.
So this is the answer. It suffices to lower the false-start cut-off to 85 ms. Thus an imprecision of the order of 1-2 ms in the measurement will not be crucial (and thus we can forget those pesky milliseconds) and the cut-off value is low enough in order to accommodate even the best starters of today (and certainly of tomorrow). On the other hand a real false starter will still be caught by the system, and, although there will be some athletes disqualified with a 84 ms reaction, nobody will find this too harsh a judgement.
While researching this article I stumbled upon a statement by a respected athletics writer who claimed that "the only rule that makes sense has to rely on the tech, not subjective human judgement". And this made me think of the absurdity of the race-walking definition where the official rules stipulate that:
Race Walking is a progression of steps so taken that the walker makes contact with the ground, so that no visible (to the human eye) loss of contact occurs.
I added emphasis on the "to the human eye" part of the rule. This illustrates the deep inconsistency of the World Athletics attitude. On the one hand decisions are based on the eminently fallible human eye and on the other they rely on equipment trusted to millisecond precision. And to add insult to injury the two are combined in the ridiculous use of photo-finish (where a judge must decide where the neck stops and the torso starts with cm accuracy) in order to decide with millisecond precision on classifications in the name of the absurd notion that a tie must be broken, sometimes even accross different heats (while in other cases two medals of the same colour are awarded to athletes with different performances).
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