Did Michael Phelps get a gold medal for a race he lost? - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine.
Technically, the question of who touched first doesn’t matter. FINA and the Olympics honchos agreed beforehand to use the touch pads; the touch pads require pressure; all swimmers and their coaches should know this. But that technical argument leaves two ugly, unresolved problems. One is that FINA, the timekeeper, the referee, and the media keep telling us, falsely, that Phelps “touched,” “arrived,” and “got his hand on the wall” first. “In our sport, it’s who touches first,” Marculescu told the AP on Saturday. Bull. It’s not who touches first. It’s who triggers the sensor first.
Did he get to the wall first? Nobody can really say. Did he punch in first? Absolutely, and that’s what counts. Competitive swimmers are taught very early to hit the wall, not touch it. I remember getting lectured on that subject before my first meet. It doesn’t matter who gets to the wall first, it’s who’s touch gets registered first.
The other problem is that even FINA isn’t sure how much pressure the touch pads require. On Saturday, Marculescu told the New York Times that the threshold was 3 kilograms per square centimeter. But in the same article, a FINA vice president said the threshold was 1.5 kilograms. If FINA’s executives don’t know the correct number, is it reasonable to expect Cavic to know it?
Really? Is it reasonable to expect that every VP or executive of a company know the exact technical specs of their product? And is it reasonable to think that anyone can manually notice the difference between 1.5 and 3 kg/sq inch? Much less at the end of an Olympic race?
Just a shitty article on many counts.
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