Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out Vox's Unexplainable Presents: Jumping the Gun About this episode Sprinter TyNia Gaither was disqualified for a false start... after the gun went off... for running faster than humanly possible. Was that even true? Do sporting officials really understand how the body works? Or do we simply not understand how to define — and record — a race?
(This episode originally aired September 21, 2022.)
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Transcript 6,218 words · 18 speakers
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0:32 Pablo Torre? This episode is brought to you by apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach, and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools. It's used by sales teams of all sizes,
1:16 Pablo Torre? from small businesses to larger organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at apollo.io. That's apollo.io. Hello, it is I, it's me. Either way, it's Pablo. Listen, it's been a hell of a two weeks here at Pablo Torre Finds Out. My brain is a little broken by that, as the intro to this might suggest. And we'll get to all of the stuff that has been developing in these last several days with the NFLPA and more in coming episodes in coming weeks. But today, we wanted to bring you something different
2:00 Pablo Torre? and also give our overworked and underrated staff some time off. And what we have for you today is an episode from one of our kindred spirits over at Vox. This is an episode of a show called Unexplainable, in which they use science multiple times a week to tell a story, to explain something. And this episode just happens to be a sports episode.
2:28 Pablo Torre? It happens to be about an object I've long been fascinated by.
2:33 Pablo Torre? And that object happens to be a gun.
2:41 Speaker 03 There's confident, and then there's Tanya Gaither.
2:43 Speaker 04 When I was younger, I used to beat up on the boys in PE. And ever since then, like, I've been addicted to what I do.
2:49 Speaker 03 What she does is sprint for Team Bahamas at the highest level.
2:53 Speaker 04 I love the adrenaline rush that I get every time I line up. I love making my family and my country proud. I wouldn't choose any other career for myself right now.
3:02 Speaker 03 Back in July, Tanya was gearing up for a huge race in Oregon.
3:06 Speaker 04 This was the World Championships, which is the biggest championship that we have as professional sprinters for the year.
3:12 Speaker 03 Tanya had been training for months, day after day, to get ready for this championship. And she'd reached the semifinals of the 100-meter dash.
3:20 Speaker 04 These moments are everything to us.
3:23 Speaker 03 It was a beautiful day, high 70s, clear blue sky.
3:26 Speaker 04 Got on the track, everything was perfect. I was really zoned in to this race because I knew what I was capable of. I knew that I was ready to run the race of my life.
3:33 Speaker 05 Tanya Gaither at the Bahamas.
3:35 Speaker 03 She lined up in the second lane.
3:37 Speaker 05 Twice a World Championship finalist ever 200.
3:40 Speaker 03 And Tanya was locked in.
3:42 Speaker 04 If you go back and watch the video, you can just see how, like, tense my face looks. I'm like, OK, yeah, like, this is gonna be great.
3:47 Speaker 03 She made sure to do her pre-race ritual.
3:50 Speaker 04 My teammates like to laugh at me about that. I slap my legs, and I throw my arms up in the air and throw them back over my head and just do like a little shimmy with my shoulders. And then I get into the blocks.
4:00 Speaker 03 She set up in the blocks, one leg in front, one leg behind, with both her hands on the ground in front of her.
4:06 Speaker 04 I heard the crowd go quiet. Of course, you can hear, you know, a few murmurs or whatever, but that's normal. And, you know, when everybody gets set and still, only when everybody's still, they'll stay set, and you'll come up in your set position. And then I heard the gun go off, and I took off. And then I heard the gun go off again, and then I stopped.
4:28 Speaker 03 At this point, it was all confusion. That second gun was officials stopping the race because someone had broken a rule.
4:35 Speaker 05 Can't see from this angle. No, I'm not sure I can see that to the naked eye either.
4:40 Speaker 03 It's a bit hard to hear, but behind the voices of the commentators, you can just make out an in-stadium announcement.
4:49 Speaker 03 False start, line two.
4:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's coming up on our screen.
4:55 Speaker 03 A false start means that Tania didn't wait for the gun before she reacted. She started too early.
5:01 Speaker 04 I couldn't believe it because I just knew it wasn't me. There was no way. I've never false started ever in my life.
5:07 Speaker 03 After a false start, all the runners have to line up again and restart. But without Tania this time, because once you false start, you're immediately disqualified.
5:16 Speaker 04 I thought it was an error.
5:18 Speaker 05 It wasn't immediately obvious to the naked eye. I'd quite like to see that again.
5:23 Speaker 04 I knew I started once I heard that gun go off.
5:26 Speaker 05 That one was so tight, I think it was indiscernible.
5:29 Speaker 04 The crowd was like, "No, no, like you didn't false start."
5:32 Speaker 05 Crowd don't like it.
5:33 Speaker 04 They was like, "Protest, protest, no, you didn't do anything."
5:38 Speaker 04 And then I was like, "Okay, no, I'd like to protest."
5:40 Speaker 05 Okay, so this might take a little while.
5:42 Speaker 03 Tania walked off the track to make her case to the official.
5:46 Speaker 04 And he has a little screen that shows him the video replay.
5:49 Speaker 05 Wow, that's so marginal. That's really hard to tell with the naked eye.
5:53 Speaker 04 Literally looked like I did nothing wrong.
5:55 Speaker 03 But the official wasn't just looking at the replay.
5:58 Speaker 04 He also showed me my reaction time, and it was like lit up in red, which means, you know, basically the start was just too fast.
6:06 Speaker 03 Pressure sensors in the starting blocks showed that Tania had started 0.093 seconds after the gun went off.
6:14 Speaker 04 After the gun went off. Like, I'm mind-blown. You're telling me I'm penalized for something I did after the gun went off?
6:24 Speaker 05 Just a reminder, I know many of you will be familiar with this. If it's quicker than a tenth of a second, it's deemed to be illegal.
6:31 Speaker 03 Tania was officially disqualified for reacting 7,000ths of a second quicker than the legal limit.
6:37 Speaker 04 According to what they were trying to tell us, no human can possibly move that fast without anticipating it.
6:43 Speaker 03 The officials were saying that because it's impossible to react within a tenth of a second, Tania must have started before the gun went off, even if no one could see it. They were basically telling Tania, "You didn't wait for the gun to go off before you started. You cheated. You guessed."
7:00 Speaker 04 There was no guessing in my start. My coach trains us to wait until we hear the start. And in fact, sometimes she'll hold it extra long for us just to see if we would jump out the block. So we train to make sure that we don't throw away our opportunities.
7:15 Speaker 03 Tania wasn't the only one who was disqualified for a false start after the gun at these world championships. It happened to Julian Alfred, who started 0.095 seconds after the gun.
7:26 Speaker 05 She's right in the center of your picture in the white. Yep. It's very, very, very marginal.
7:31 Speaker 03 And then it happened to Devon Allen, who started 0.099 seconds after the gun.
7:37 Speaker 06 And he is faster than that tenth of a second allowance. You know how much faster he is? By 1,000ths of a second. I just saw the start official say, "I'm sorry."
7:48 Speaker 03 All three of these sprinters started after the gun, and all three of them were disqualified in some of the biggest races of the year.
7:55 Speaker 05 I really don't like seeing people disqualified. Having said that, rules are rules, aren't they? It was our rules. You're right.
8:01 Speaker 04 But I just couldn't understand what they were saying.
8:05 Speaker 03 I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, how fast can humans react? And is a rule like this actually fair?
8:29 Speaker 03 Okay, Brian.
8:30 Speaker 07 Nob.
8:31 Speaker 03 There's this rule in running that we've both been thinking about for a while.
8:34 Speaker 07 Yeah.
8:34 Speaker 03 It's designed to prevent people from guessing when the gun goes off. And it all relies on the assumption that it's impossible to react in less than a tenth of a second, that people who start that quickly are actually starting in their heads before the gun. So I wanted to ask you about the science here. Like, does this idea of a limit to human reaction time make sense?
8:55 Speaker 07 Yes, the concept behind this rule does make sense. You can't react instantly to a sound.
9:02 Speaker 08 There is a neurophysiological limits that need to be defined to prevent some athlete to have an unfair advantage by anticipating the gun.
9:12 Speaker 07 So I found a scientist who's doing his PhD on this exact question. His name is Mathieu Milos.
9:19 Speaker 08 My name is Mathieu Milos.
9:20 Speaker 07 He's French, so I apologize if I've said his name wrong. And he thinks this idea of setting a limit makes sense because reacting to a gun just takes time.
9:31 Speaker 03 Right.
9:31 Speaker 07 There's so many things that need to happen just to get you out of the starting box.
9:35 Speaker 08 There is like different component to the response time.
9:39 Speaker 07 So first, the gun goes off.
9:44 Speaker 07 There's time it takes for that sound of the gun to get into your ears.
9:48 Speaker 08 So there is the time.
9:49 Speaker 07 Your ears has to convert that stimulus into a neural signal.
9:53 Speaker 08 Then there is the time.
9:55 Speaker 07 Your nervous system has to identify that signal.
9:57 Speaker 08 The time.
9:59 Speaker 07 Send a command down to your muscles to start moving, and that takes some time. And then there's time for like the muscle itself to start contracting, to move.
10:08 Speaker 08 And then there is the time.
10:13 Speaker 07 Like you actually exerting force on the starting box that would detect your movement.
10:19 Speaker 08 So there is all these different components. It's complex.
10:25 Speaker 07 So this idea of a limit in sprinting makes sense.
10:29 Speaker 03 Mm hmm.
10:30 Speaker 07 But what I just cannot figure out is where this number, 10th of a second, where does that come from?
10:36 Speaker 03 So I looked into this. I talked to a historian who wrote a report about this for World Athletics, which is the organization that runs these world championships we've been talking about.
10:44 Speaker 07 Okay.
10:44 Speaker 03 His name is PJ Vazell, and he told me that it actually traces all the way back to the 60s and this West German sprinter named Armin Hari. With a surging power and explosive pace, but he also possessed the most dubious starting technique that international sprinting has ever seen. Hari was famous for being a suspiciously fast starter. His fellow Germans called him the thief of starts. He did apparently have a really fast reaction time. They tested him, though we don't know exactly how accurate that was.
11:15 Speaker 09 Many believe he actually beats the gun.
11:18 Speaker 03 Ultimately, we don't know if Hari was guessing his starts or if he just had superhuman reflexes, but in 1960, he won a bunch of races, got called for some false starts, and people were pissed because back then, you know, you didn't get immediately disqualified for your first false start. They would just run the race again.
11:36 Speaker 07 Oh, okay.
11:37 Speaker 03 So it got a little messy. And West Germany, you know, they wanted something more objective, so they got these force sensors that could automatically detect when someone started. And this 10th of a second limit basically comes from the company that designed them.
11:52 Speaker 10 The traditional brand Hume Hans has been a trailblazer in watch design for 160 years.
11:58 Speaker 03 That said that they had tested a bunch of runners and found that no one could start faster than a 10th of a second.
12:04 Speaker 07 Okay.
12:04 Speaker 03 So that sort of like company finding became the basis for this rule of thumb that continued for a couple decades until 1989, when World Athletics, then known as IAAF, made it official.
12:20 Speaker 07 So when Tania was disqualified and told you couldn't have possibly started that fast.
12:26 Speaker 03 Right.
12:27 Speaker 07 That was just based on something a German company said in the 1960s?
12:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, basically.
12:34 Speaker 07 Okay.
12:35 Speaker 03 That's what this historian told me. World Athletics has said it's based on science. So I reached out to them and they told me that a 10th of a second was determined to be the quote, "minimum auditory reaction time." But they didn't point to a specific study.
12:49 Speaker 07 Okay.
12:50 Speaker 03 The main study that other people point to is this study on eight amateur sprinters, which is just a really small sample size. And it also seems like the study came out after they made the rule. So I just basically have a ton of questions about the science here.
13:06 Speaker 07 Okay, so this whole story you're telling me makes perfect sense, considering when I asked Mathieu about this number, like, do you think it's valid? He told me-
13:14 Speaker 08 The 100 millisecond false start threshold is not science-based.
13:19 Speaker 07 He argues that this 10th of a second limit is just not based in rigorous science.
13:25 Speaker 03 Okay.
13:25 Speaker 07 And we really don't know what the actual number is, what the limit ought to be. If you look at the scientific literature, you can find there have been a bunch of studies that try to answer the question, how fast someone can start a race? And they all kind of find slightly different numbers. People can start faster than 0.1 seconds. Mathieu says he's even found this in his own work.
13:48 Speaker 08 I'm sure that you can react in less than 100 milliseconds in sprint start.
13:55 Speaker 07 And there is no paper you can go to that has like the gold standard for studying how fast people can start. There's a lot of small studies on this. They find different numbers. So there's just not a lot of confidence from the scientific community that World Athletics has like a correct, firm number here.
14:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, I actually came across a study that was commissioned by World Athletics itself in 2009. And that study said the 10th of a second limit is incorrect.
14:26 Speaker 07 Oh, so they know this?
14:27 Speaker 03 Apparently. And I asked them about that, but they said this study was too small to actually merit a rule change.
14:34 Speaker 07 So do a better study.
14:36 Speaker 03 Right, I mean, given that all of these studies are so small, it makes me wonder, like, is reaction time in a race a particularly hard thing to study?
14:46 Speaker 07 When I asked Mathieu about this, he explained it is very complicated. There are just a lot of variables to control for. So one thing here is that depending on how loud the start sound is, people might start faster.
15:00 Speaker 03 Like a startle response or something?
15:02 Speaker 07 Yeah, well, it's just like if it's louder, people seem to start faster. And then the longer the official wait, the faster the start times can be. Because like you're just, you're just so ready to start.
15:13 Speaker 03 It's like a, it's like a spring being coiled up or something?
15:16 Speaker 07 Yeah. And then like, when it comes to like these sensors themselves, apparently like how they decide when a start happens can be like very variable between sensors. Like there doesn't seem to be enough consistency here in either like the science or the practice to like really exactly nail down a number.
15:34 Speaker 03 So if this 10th of a second limit isn't based on rigorous science, do we have a sense of what a better general area of rightness might be?
15:43 Speaker 07 So I asked Mathieu this question and he said,
15:48 Speaker 08 If I give you a number now, I will kind of lie to you.
15:51 Speaker 07 If I gave you a number, I would be lying to you. If you look around, there are some scientists who have done some like back of the napkin calculations, you know, that whole list of things that I outlined that need to happen before you could start a race. Some say that could take 85 milliseconds, so 15 milliseconds faster than, you know, what is allowed. But then again, like, you know, Mathieu was, he was very insistent on there's like, there's no perfect way to measure anything. So any measurement is going to come with some range of error. At the same time, Mathieu thinks it's important to get a better range of what the limit could be because the victories here can be decided by hundreds, thousands of a second.
16:33 Speaker 08 The margin of victory is so small in spring start. I think it's worth to try to improve this.
16:40 Speaker 07 Mechu basically thinks that improving on this number and getting a better estimate of it will really make races fair.
16:50 Speaker 03 So is there a way to get a better sense of what this limit might be? Or is it just too many moving parts?
16:57 Speaker 07 He just wants to make this research a lot more rigorous.
16:59 Speaker 03 Okay.
17:00 Speaker 07 He really wants to take the fastest elite athletes and bring them into the lab.
17:04 Speaker 03 So not amateurs anymore?
17:05 Speaker 07 Yeah, not using amateurs.
17:07 Speaker 08 Top level sprinters reacts quicker than you and me.
17:11 Speaker 07 It turns out on the track, during a competition, there's some evidence that suggests that runners are not starting as fast as they possibly could because they just don't want to risk false starting.
17:22 Speaker 08 They prefer to delay their response time to not be disqualified.
17:26 Speaker 03 Ah.
17:27 Speaker 07 That's why he wants to bring them to the lab and say, okay, everyone, don't worry about false starts. We just want to see how fast you could possibly start and just collect a lot of data on some of the fastest people in the world. He wants to make sure researchers can control for all those variables with the sensors and really just find a gold standard to agree on that this is the best way to record a race start and then plot that data in a distribution curve and see really where we can better decide on where the limit is.
17:59 Speaker 03 Okay.
18:00 Speaker 07 He also thinks that we've been measuring sprint starts in just the wrong place.
18:04 Speaker 03 What do you, what do you mean?
18:06 Speaker 07 So far, we've been talking about the feet.
18:07 Speaker 03 Right.
18:08 Speaker 07 You know, like when your foot moves, like that's when the race starts. But he says like the actual first thing that moves when you start to run are your hands.
18:15 Speaker 03 Like you're crouched in the starting blocks, your two hands are on the ground in front of you and you're pushing off with your hands.
18:21 Speaker 07 Yeah.
18:21 Speaker 08 Yeah, they push on the floor first.
18:23 Speaker 07 So that is the first movement you do. And like, he says that is much faster.
18:28 Speaker 08 I have a difference, an average difference about 50 milliseconds between the impulse in the legs and the impulse on the floor that react first.
18:37 Speaker 03 So that's like a huge difference.
18:39 Speaker 07 Yeah, maybe that's where we should decide where the race starts.
18:46 Speaker 03 So that all sounds great.
18:50 Speaker 07 Okay.
18:50 Speaker 03 But to be honest, like, I'm not actually sure more science and more technology is the whole answer here.
18:59 Speaker 07 Isn't the answer usually more science? We need more science? I always say it on this show like every week.
19:05 Speaker 03 It's definitely often science, but when it comes to sports, I mean, I think using technology in the name of fairness, it's harder than you think. And there's an argument that sort of a hyper-focus on technology might actually be ruining sports a bit.
19:22 Speaker 07 Oh, I want to hear that.
19:24 Speaker 03 I'll tell you after the break.
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20:36 Speaker 11 So he yells out, "Ready, on your mark, get set." And I was so keyed up, I just took off.
20:44 Speaker 03 So we've got this rule that really seems to be unscientific, to say the least.
20:49 Speaker 07 Yeah.
20:49 Speaker 03 And honestly, kind of unfair. And there's rumblings that World Athletics might be considering changing it. A World Athletics Council member from Finland actually called for a rule change on this. And the president of World Athletics said-
21:04 Speaker 12 And yeah, the false start rule, I'm sure, will be looked at by the Competition Commission. And everything is on the table, as it always is after a championship.
21:14 Speaker 03 World Athletics actually sent me a great statement on this, which said, quote, "It is standard procedure after each World Championships for the World Athletics Competition Commission to review the championships and recommend any rule changes."
21:27 Speaker 07 So they're not saying anything?
21:29 Speaker 03 Not really. So until they do figure out how to change this, I guess, I was wondering if we could try to figure out how we might get to a perfectly fair race.
21:40 Speaker 07 Yeah, like, what are the options here?
21:43 Speaker 03 Okay, so on the one hand, we've got Machu, right? He wants to use more science, more technology, to kind of get finer distinctions on this limit, you know, take this kind of non-scientific 10th of a second limit and bring it firmly into the realm of science, rigorous science, like you said.
22:01 Speaker 07 Yeah.
22:01 Speaker 03 And that's broadly what a lot of the people I spoke to also told me. So the historian I talked to, PJ, he said he wanted a lower, more precise limit. I talked to a sports scientist, Matt Payne, who said the same thing. And they both said, "We also need more transparency around exactly how these machines work."
22:20 Speaker 07 Yeah.
22:20 Speaker 03 So, you know, we can hold them accountable.
22:22 Speaker 07 Yeah, we need to know, like, each machine is making the same decision around, like, when that person started.
22:29 Speaker 03 Right, and that's actually what some people think happened at the World Championships with Tania and these other runners, that something must have been up with the machines, because reaction times were just, like, super fast across the board. And honestly, I think that's a key problem with having this really strictly enforced limit, because applying this tiny distinction across tons of machines perfectly consistently without any error is clearly showing itself to be really difficult.
22:58 Speaker 07 Yeah.
22:59 Speaker 03 And it's also always possible that someone can come along, you know, with just superhuman reaction time. And slightly, just slightly break this limit, whatever we find.
23:07 Speaker 07 Yeah, and the limit is always going to be a fuzzy number anyway.
23:11 Speaker 03 Right. And, you know, if you draw a clear line in the middle of what is ultimately just a fuzzy border, and someone is barely on the other side of that clear line, like, is it really enough to label them a cheater?
23:25 Speaker 07 I don't know.
23:25 Speaker 03 You know, like, technology doesn't necessarily make fuzzy borders go away.
23:30 Speaker 13 Sports have not been created or invented to deal with the technology that we have today.
23:38 Speaker 03 So I talked to this sports writer, Joe Poznanski, and he's written a lot about the use of technology in sports. Joe says that, like, technology can give us a lot more data, but it's not always clear that more data equals more accuracy, especially when we're dealing with sort of fuzzy borders and, and sports, which are ultimately, they're games, right? They're not scientific experiments.
23:58 Speaker 13 There is a way to break down the context of any game to a point where it's no longer a game, where it's no longer makes any sense.
24:07 Speaker 07 I think it's kind of funny. We've been talking to scientists who the answer to this question is, well, we just need more precise sensors. We need better science. We need more, you know, data, data, data. And I'm sure that's, that's fun for them.
24:19 Speaker 03 Right. Yeah. And Joe told me that it can cause some real problems.
24:24 Speaker 13 In baseball, for example, it used to be that a guy stole a base and the tag was late, he was safe. That's how that worked.
24:37 Speaker 03 So as long as you're touching the base, you're safe.
24:39 Speaker 07 That's the one thing I know about baseball.
24:41 Speaker 03 Right. That's the main rule of baseball.
24:44 Speaker 13 But now, if you slow it down enough, you'll see that occasionally, the guy, when he slides into second base.
24:51 Speaker 03 Just for a fraction of a second.
24:54 Speaker 13 His foot will bounce off the bag for like the smallest amount. I mean, a millimeter.
25:01 Speaker 03 And what happens in baseball now sometimes is they go to this, like, instant replay review, and then the ump's like.
25:07 Speaker 13 He's out now.
25:12 Speaker 13 That's not the way the game was intended to be played. Nobody ever even knew this existed.
25:17 Speaker 03 And they stopped the game for like a while.
25:19 Speaker 13 You know, instead it becomes this people just poring over it like it's the Zabruder film, trying to figure out, is this guy safe? Is this guy out? It's not great.
25:29 Speaker 07 You know, I'm realizing that if we, if we went the max technology limit and you actually got to an absurdly small view, you would see that actually we don't touch anything.
25:40 Speaker 03 Matter is mostly empty space. It's, it's just electromagnetism that's convincing us we're touching, right?
25:45 Speaker 07 Yes.
25:45 Speaker 03 No runner is ever touching a base and no fielder is ever tagging a runner.
25:50 Speaker 07 This is, this is a little, I think we got a little too deep for this topic.
25:54 Speaker 03 I don't know.
25:54 Speaker 07 But I see what you mean in that like, there's always going to be like, the closer you zoom into things, you, you see actually like our experience of that thing, like touching a base is not necessarily what's happening on a microscopic view.
26:10 Speaker 03 Yeah. And it's not just baseball either. Like in basketball, there are these endless replay reviews on fouls.
26:17 Speaker 14 I get so bored of these replays. We got a great game going.
26:21 Speaker 03 Again, it's a gray area of like, what is a foul?
26:23 Speaker 14 Is that an offensive foul or I don't know?
26:26 Speaker 03 And then in football, there's this kind of like deeply philosophical issue of what is a catch?
26:31 Speaker 07 What?
26:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, like it used to be.
26:33 Speaker 07 Like it's in your hands?
26:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, it seems like this really simple idea, like, are you holding the ball? But now it's like.
26:39 Speaker 06 The runner did not complete the catch during the process of the catch.
26:43 Speaker 07 Okay.
26:44 Speaker 03 If you zoom in really close, is the ball moving a tiny little bit when you hit the ground like?
26:48 Speaker 07 Even though it's in your hands?
26:49 Speaker 03 Even though it's in your hands. And even though like, it was always considered a catch before.
26:55 Speaker 06 And you've got to continue through the play. We will now review the previous play.
27:02 Speaker 03 I don't want to sound like technology is really bad, you know? It has its place in sports, especially when the lines aren't as fuzzy. So like, who finishes a race first seems a lot easier to judge on replay than who started. Or like tennis where, you know, whether a ball is in or out, like that's a pretty clear decision. But using fancy technology and tons of camera angles on things like the start of a race or what is a catch in football, it can end up being really disappointing to fans because, you know, you're expecting this clear, objective result from all this technology. And it's just a fuzzy border. Like, technology can't solve this problem.
27:42 Speaker 07 Yeah, we signed up to come to a game, not to a, you know, slide presentation.
27:46 Speaker 03 It's, it's, yeah, it's like something you would do in a lab. It's not something you want to do, you know, in an arena.
27:52 Speaker 07 So should we just throw out all the sensors, the cameras, everything? And just, just go out there and have fun?
28:01 Speaker 03 So I think there's a couple of things we could do here. So we could throw out the limit entirely. Like, just go back to the eye test to see who false started.
28:10 Speaker 07 Yeah.
28:10 Speaker 03 But this sports scientist I talked to told me that, like, people's perception of movement can actually be different. So some people could actually be better at spotting movement than other people.
28:22 Speaker 07 So introducing yet another complication to when does a race start?
28:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, and, and we could also, like, keep these pressure sensors, but just get rid of this 10th of a second reaction time limit. Like, just have the race start when the gun goes off and just say, that's, that's it.
28:39 Speaker 07 That makes sense to me, you know, like, not, not giving people, you know, penalties for these apparent thought crimes that they, you know, started before the gun in their head.
28:49 Speaker 03 Right, that's intuitive, right? Like, that's what we think a race should be. But without this reaction time limit, both of these other options might actually incentivize runners to anticipate the gun, like, to guess when the gun would go off.
29:01 Speaker 07 Is it a huge problem to anticipate the gun? Couldn't that just be a part of the race?
29:08 Speaker 03 Well, it's against the rules, for one thing, but it could also just make races super chaotic. Like, there'd be false starts and restarts all the time. I don't really think races would want to incentivize that.
29:20 Speaker 07 Wouldn't runners still just get disqualified? There, there's still a big cost for jumping the gun.
29:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's a big cost, but the people I talked to said they think runners would risk it. Like, if you're racing someone who's just way faster than you and your only shot is to anticipate the gun, you might just risk it, even if you could get disqualified. And then some people probably wouldn't risk it. So, you know, if we're looking for the fairest possible race, like, one where every single person is being timed from the gun to the finish line, I don't really think the answer is taking away the limit and maybe encouraging people to jump the gun more.
29:54 Speaker 07 I think every option here will fail us in some way. It's just deciding which failure feels like sports.
30:04 Speaker 03 I think that's exactly right. And that's something that Joe said to me. He basically said.
30:09 Speaker 13 There's no way to make sports perfectly fair. What you want to do is make it fair enough that people have faith in it. But we accept the illusion.
30:22 Speaker 03 So Joe's favorite solution for fuzzy borders in sports like baseball and football is just to accept the gray area. Let the official watch the replay in real time, no slow mo. And if the call can't be overturned, just stick with the call in the field because perfectly fair isn't possible.
30:38 Speaker 07 Yeah, I think perfect fairness is impossible. But at least with this false start rule, we could probably make it a little fairer.
30:48 Speaker 03 We definitely can, especially because we know this reaction time limit isn't right. So lowering the limit seems like a clear move.
30:56 Speaker 07 Yeah.
30:56 Speaker 03 We can embrace the fact that we'll probably need to keep updating it over time. And then ultimately, if we're honest about the fact that when a race starts is kind of this fuzzy border, we'll end up labeling fewer people cheaters who probably didn't cheat.
31:12 Speaker 04 It's still embarrassing because, you know, you don't want to ever be labeled as somebody that cheated.
31:18 Speaker 03 Tanya is still thinking about her false start at the world championships in July, when officials said she started before hearing the gun.
31:25 Speaker 04 I literally waited till I heard what I needed to hear, just like I have done in hundreds of other races.
31:31 Speaker 03 For a while, it was hard to shake.
31:33 Speaker 04 You know, I haven't really shared this with many people, but I've kind of been experiencing a little PTSD with it because now, when I get in my blocks, the only thing that I'm thinking about in my blocks is be patient. That's literally the thing that's been engraved in my head since that moment. Be patient because you can't afford for that to happen again. I'm one of the true lovers of this sport. I love what I do.
31:55 Speaker 04 And, you know, as, as big of a blow as that was, it, it hasn't changed, you know, my eagerness to step on the line.
32:03 Speaker 03 And last month, in August, she was back on the blocks at another big race.
32:08 Speaker 15 Brittany Brown followed closely by Tania Gaither.
32:11 Speaker 03 She took home a silver medal, running a personal best in the 200 meter dash. But the thought of that false start after the gun in July, it's still lingering in the back of her head. So at the end of all this, I, I told her about our reporting and all the people we've talked to. And I guess like, it doesn't seem like, to me, like you cheated.
32:29 Speaker 04 Yes, that's how I feel.
32:33 Speaker 04 But I guess the data says I cheated.
32:36 Speaker 03 And, you know, I, I think based on the science here, we have good reason to say Tania Gaither is not a cheater.
32:42 Speaker 04 Wow. Well, I really appreciate that. I, I would love for the world to see that, that research.
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33:37 Speaker 07 This episode was reported and produced by Noam Hassanfeld and me, Brian Resnick. It was edited by Meredith Hadenot and Catherine Wells. Noam wrote the music. Efim Shapiro did the mixing and sound design. And Serena Solan checked the facts. Mandy Nguyen is growing magic beans in her backyard. Christian Aiella is hanging out on the other side of the world from us. And Bird Pinkerton hasn't found treasure in the woods yet, but she did find a mysterious key. Special thanks to PJ Vazell, Matt Payne, and Robert Johnson for their help this week. If you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us.
34:21 Speaker 07 We're [email protected] . We'd also love it if you wrote us a review or a rating. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.
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