Hacker News Reader

Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, keep in mind at athletics competition, a "false start" is deemed to be anything within 100m of the actual firing gun - because that is deemed to be below the level of human perception, and therefore someone "bet" or "guessed".

So I can't imagine a human can take a conscious step to get a FIVE millisecond advantage over another.

View on HN

Your comment just made me realize something. The 5 milliseconds which Lyles won by is shorter than the time it takes sound to travel between his lane and Thompson's. If the starting gun were on the outside of the track (it's not), then Thompson would have actually run the race faster, if measured from the time he perceived the sound.

In reality the gun is usually on the inside of the track, so it would be Lyles overcoming this (negligible) advantage.

There's a speaker behind each runner in the starting blocks to avoid that being a factor.

True, but each speaker is positioned slightly differently, because it's immediately behind the blocks but each athlete sets the blocks slightly differently (to accomodate their legs). So in theory...

Tbh, it's all just bullshit to me. Less than 20 years ago, this would have been an ex-aequo, and glorifying someone who happened to dive 5-milliseconds-better is just sad. The obsession with "having a winner", for the benefit of sponsors and image contracts, has taken sports in some ridiculous places.

That's somewhat the nature of sports: the actual results always have some amount of variance. The differences between athletes are often minute enough that with slightly different circumstances the result would have been different. Yet the pressure of a smaller number of contests with outsized prizes does make for dramatic highs when winning for the competitors as well as drama for the spectators.

Of course you can. A good drummer will not deviate from beat by that much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com