Thoughts on Fairness in Rowing | Hacker News Reader

Thoughts on Fairness in Rowing

rowinginmotion.com

56 pointsAlex391720 comments

Wow, didn't expect one of my rowing related articles to ever appear on HN. Thanks for posting, hope you found it interesting.

Also interesting if you like this: "Why There Are So Many Ties in Swimming", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12282326

Interesting article. BTW, I think you have a typo: "The Germans had one their heat over GB, who had to go through the repechage". I think you meant "won" there, not "one".

Thanks, fixed!

I certainly didn't expect it to make the front page when I submitted it, but I do try to submit good stuff regardless just on principle.

The point in which a rower is at in the stroke when they cross the finish line can have a hugely outsized influence on the result. During the catch, the boat momentarily slows down while the blades enter the water, and then it surges forward during the drive. This is exaggerated even more than it is in swimming and makes a huge difference in these kind of close finishes. Nothing to do with fairness, but in a close race there is a lot of luck as to where you are in the stroke when you finish.

I watched this race live and it was frustrating to not know the outcome - I thought Damir had won. I would have liked to see them receive a tie. Rowing governing body should adjust this to match swimming where they measure down to 1/100th of finish time and use that as the only determinant rather than examining the much more precise photo finish. So many other things are not as precise over a 2000m course in variable water conditions - this isn't a 100m dash that's over in 10 seconds.

"Nothing to do with fairness, but in a close race there is a lot of luck as to where you are in the stroke when you finish"

Swimmers train on this; it's harder for rowers because the longer lane and variation in wind and wave conditions make it effectively impossible to estimate the stroke phase at the finish, but rowers can and do race forward in their last stroke, just like runners can change their running style before the finish line, even in a marathon.

I also thought Damir had won, but wasn't frustrated to wait, and also wouldn't want this declared a tie. It's very unfortunate for some of the competitors, but it also is one of the things that keeps a sport interesting (yes, I'm against using video technology in soccer, too).

If they did ties, we wouldn't have had that 10 minute or so of 'nothing happens' excitement in 2000 when Ekaterina Karsten beat Rumyana Neykova by 0.01 second, but both had to wait for 5+ minutes (IIRC, the next race had finished before the jury made the call) or so before knowing that.

And yes, there likely is a larger error at the start, but that, IMO, doesn't matter much. The rowers row against each other, and I doubt even a 10 cm difference at the start would often make a difference.

Given the often varying water and wind conditions, if you really want "when we aren't 100% sure A was faster than B, declare a tie", I think one should even declare a tie if there is a meter between boats.

The biggest problem in rowing is that you look towards the back that you can't possibly know exactly when you'll cross the finish line. And you're so tunnelled after even 200m of racing (very narrow field of vision, due to unbelievable exhaustion + pain, with the nagging though of 1800m still to go...) that you can't count the buoys either to make out the distance to the finish line. For most of the races I had in my active career, I can barely remember the final 500m of a race. You're just concentrating on every single stroke and trying to squeeze the maximum out of your body. Trying to "rush" to finish line is absolutely impossible.

I might be too late to add this, but Rowing in Motion (my product) actually helps rowers analyze this using a smartphone's integrated accelerometer + gps. We can even live transmit the data to a coach following behind in the motorboat and overlay it (in realtime on the GPU) onto video footage captured from the camera.

See this video for a demo of the result https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdVSk3mA9Wk

And this article for an explanation of how the boat's acceleration pattern relates to rowing technique: https://www.rowinginmotion.com/optimize-your-rowing-stroke-w...

And this for an explanation of the math behind it (i.e. why certain acceleration patterns are more efficient than others and optimum technique will make you go faster): https://www.rowinginmotion.com/drag-efficiency-rowing/

Needless to say biomechanic analysis on smartphones is a ton of fun :-D

These are two great articles and I wish we had access to this kind of tech when I rowed competitively! I'll pass the app information on to my club.

This is probably why I was always faster on the erg than in the water ;)

The big issue with a photo finish on this for me is I bet the starts weren't accurate to 2cm. I'd also wonder if the camera was fixed to avoid that margin of parallax error, which is much easier on a small running track than a wide expanse of water.

Still, that photo-finish is a paragon of fairness and clarity compared with the Olympic marathon swimming, in which after swimming in the sea for 10k, it all came down to who could "strongly" touch one of a few small pads on a beam suspended above their heads on a raft floating on the choppy seas: in a finish where ability to obstruct an opponent without being penalised for it could count for as much as swimming speed and timing on touching the pad.

Remarkably the men's Olympic race produced (i) a gold medal photo-finish after nearly two hours that was so close that it took 15 minutes to figure out they'd initially named the wrong man as the winner and (ii) 2.2 seconds behind them, a three way photofinish for bronze (the third person to post that time was subsequently for disqualified for what he described as fighting off somebody that was holding onto his leg in the final sprint...)

The women's race saw the a silver medal photo-finish before one of the swimmers was disqualified for reaching over the top of her opponent to touch the pad first in a manner which looked a little bit too much like dunking

So if losing a rowing sprint by a couple of centimetres sounds tough, spare a thought for the person that is two centimetres away from touching a moving finish line whilst their competitor elbows them, after swimming for two hours to get there

"gold medal photo-finish after nearly two hours that was so close that it took 15 minutes to figure out they'd initially named the wrong man as the winner"

For me, that was more a matter of the jury figuring out what the rules are. The GPS tracker of swimmer A passed the finish line .7 seconds before B did, but swimmer B hit the board half a second or so before A did. Both differences are easy to spot, even without the benefit of slow-motion (https://youtu.be/iQY6EoYVRxs). So, if you know what determines the winner, it should be easy to figure out who won.

This race probably has taught them not to connect the GPS measurements directly to numbers shown on screen to a worldwide audience.

The olympic marathon swimming was indeed mean. In any case, it's up to the sports organisations to determine what the rules are and what the rules should be. I don't say it's wrong what we're doing in rowing. In fact, using a photofinish with a minimum resolution of 1/100th of a second is an easy and pragmatic solution.

But it's not necessarily the way things have to be forever. My main concern is that it pretends to offer a precise measurement of relative performance when in fact it cannot because we can't guarantee a similarly precise alignment at the start. Or at least the rules don't ask for it (accuracy of alignment + precision of its measurement is not prescribed in the in the FISA rules of racing).

Why was there a delay in announcing the result? Cycling uses a similar photo finish system and sprint results are usually provided fairly quickly (within a minute or two).

The umpires have to see whether any crew taking part makes an objection (typically because another crew interfered with their racing) before they can raise a white flag, and the jury has to wait for that white flag before announcing a result (AFAIK, results never are corrected, except for doping related reasons)

That has to happen "after the finish of the race and before leaving the area of the finish line"

Given the physical state rowers can be in at the finish line, 'immediately' isn't measured in seconds.

Correction: results can be overturned after a race, but not because of new objections, only when an involved party (may be the original objector or another crew) objects to the decision made after someone made an objection.

Also, for such objections, to show that you are serious, you have to put money on the table (CHF 100 or equivalent) that you forfeit when your objections is rejected.

Interesting. In cycling (the road disciplines, at least), results are announced, then there is a window of time to lodge a protest. So, you do get occasional revisions after the fact (generally in bunch sprints, where somebody failed to hold their line). So, when watching on TV, it's never more than a minute or two to get preliminary results from the finish officials.

I actually rowed in high school, then a bit in college. But, we never used photo-finish equipment (at least not that I ever noticed). But, I know all about the physical state of the competitors after a race.

Every sport has its own idiosyncrasies. For example, in fencing leaving the field of play means accepting the result as announced by the jury, even if a protest is being discussed.

London 2012 saw an extreme example, where a fencer stayed on the piste for over an hour in protest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_A-lam)

My takeaway on this is that any specification of a physical thing that doesn't explicitly specify tolerances is not really specified as much as it is idealized.

Exactly! Plus, if you focus so much on the finishing line in an iota-scale and disregard the plethora of other factors that could've granted that difference, you're just being silly.

Sums it up perfectly. I might steal that quote :-)

I wonder if this is the kind of thing Ben-Hur thinks about to pass the time.

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