Speed of Sound Is Too Slow For the Olympics

Hugh Pickens "For decades sports-event organizers have placed speakers behind athletes to convey the sound of an actual pistol but they found that even though the noise came through the speakers all at once, athletes continued to wait for the 'real' sound, ignoring the sounds that came through the speakers ever-so-slightly slowing down the farthest athlete from the gun. Now Rebecca Rosen writes that when the Olympic runners take to their positions on the track later this week, they'll crouch on the ground, ears pricked, and wait for the starting beep played by a 'pistol' that's not a pistol at all, but something more akin to an electronic instrument with only one key. The pistol itself is silent." Read on for a bit more about the difficulties of timing people with superhuman reaction times.

"A conversation with sprinter Michael Johnson at the Sydney Olympics caused Peter Hürzeler of OMEGA Timing to realize that even with speakers, the speed of sound was still slowing down the farthest athletes. Johnson's reaction time, Hurzeler said, 'was 440 thousandths of a second. Normally athletes leave between 130 and 140 thousandths of a second. ... I asked him, why did you have such a bad starting time?' Turned out, Johnson was in the ninth position, and the sound of the gun was reaching him too slowly.

"In addition after a four year developmental process, a new false start detection system is being introduced this year that will abandon movement in exchange for 'measurement' of pound-force against the back block to determine sprinters reaction times. 'We are measuring the time between the starting gun and when the athlete is moving because to leave the starting block they had to push against and this power is very high' says Hurzeler. 'We did a test last year with Asafa Powell and he was pushing 240 kilograms (529 lbs.) [so] as soon as he gives the time to push against the starting block, it means he will like to leave and we are measuring this in thousandths of seconds and if somebody is leaving before one hundredth thousandth of second, it's automatically a recall, it's a false start.' In track every event is timed to 1/10,000th of a second, and Omega takes 2,000 pictures per second from right before the start of a race to its finish, as backup.

"New touch pads, starting blocks, and timers have also been introduced for swimming."

LED strip along the ground.

[RivenAleem]

Why not just lights? Works for F1.

hamster wheels!

[catmistake]

How about placing runners in some kind of human-sized hamster wheels with clutch mechanisms, so that all runners can already be running at top speed for some short period prior to the actual start of the race, at which time all of the clutches are simultaneously disengaged, so all runners start at full their full stride and their full speed at the same time? This would change the dynamics of racing because it would remove reaction time as a competitive element from the race. But what is a race? Is it to see who has the fastest reaction time, or who runs the fastest, or both?

Re:I call bullshit.

[vlm]

You Americans still don't get this metric stuff do you.

Use the right tool for the job, in this case imperial. We're talking about feet in an olympic article about running and feet, so use feet to measure. Not millionths of the distance from Paris to the north pole or wavelengths of cesium or WTF arbitrary measurement a metre is. Use feet. Yes, it would be dumb to use human feet to measure an interplanetary space probe, but this is totally appropriate.

Sound travels at 5 secs/mile as anybody who's survived a thunderstorm and counted miles away by fives knows. In other words one second = 1000 feet or sound takes about "a thousandth" to go a foot. The article is babbling about measuring run times to ten thousandths of a second, and sounds takes one thousandth to go a foot, so it doesn't take a genius engineer or physicist to figure if you want tenths accuracy you need to position the speakers the same distance from the ears with tenth of a foot accuracy, or "about an inch". Which the olympic fools still aren't doing correctly, as near as I can tell.

Its all idiocy for show anyway. They have to start at the same instant because in ye olden days they didn't have computer measurements, so they determined the winner by who passed the line first. They should just run individually now and use chrono gates much like at a gun range. Yes yes, I know its motivational to run together and "compete" while running but these are adults not five year olds, so they can be expected to run "really fast all the time" even if not in a pack or herd. I'm sure the steroids will ensure a proper competitive attitude and outlook on life.