At first I thought you were not getting it, but, thinking it through, I now think the real problem is that the article gave us the averages (600, 701, 5000) without giving the standard deviations and nobody is outraged!

The combined result of the three experiments can be either surprising or absolutely obvious: if the standard deviation of each of the three experiments was around 1 cm, it would be troubling, if it was 100 cm, it would be troublesome yet, but if the standard deviation is 5000 cm, there would be nothing wrong in what happened.