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Jthundercleese t1_iu3c0bh wrote

Reply to comment by st6374 in TIL Devon Allen, track & field athlete/Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver, was disqualified in the World Athletic Championships for a controversial false start. The starting blocks measured his reaction time from the time the gun went off at 0.099, which is 0.001 seconds faster than legally allowed. by The_Critical_Cynic

It has nothing to do with him breaking rules. The logic behind him "false starting" is that he predicted when the start would be (based on nothing) and started one one thousandth of a second before that; infinitesimal odds of that being the case. Elite runners having faster reaction times than .1 seconds has become a common phenomena. This is a case where the rules are provably far behind the times and based on defunct science.

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The_Critical_Cynic OP t1_iu3cvxu wrote

I agree completely with that assessment. It would be harder, in this instance, to start on time than it would to start thousandths of a second earlier. Furthermore, if you were to try to start exactly on time, you would be more likely end up late off the starting line than be on time, which is completely unacceptable when those milliseconds make a literal difference between qualifying or not.

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Jthundercleese t1_iu3d8xt wrote

I listened to a pretty extensive podcast on the issue. It's lead to runners purposefully hesitating in order to not get DQed for false starts. It's screwing over the athletes who are actually just the best at what they do, and everyone involved knows it but won't do anything.

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The_Critical_Cynic OP t1_iu3ev1c wrote

Based on what I've read and heard about it, I figured something like that was bound to come up. I mentioned to u/JuzoItami that there should be some sort of an appeals process, and the standards addressed accordingly.

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geniice t1_iu4o14x wrote

The athletes are free to show that can pass a random reaction time test with a better than 0.15 second time. Until then we can ignore such claims.

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Jthundercleese t1_iu52h8n wrote

So your assumption is that athletes are consistently guessing when the start time is? The science of reaction time doesn't support your BS.

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