Are women getting away with more Olympic false starts?
Here's another interesting link sent by Liz Kay of Consuming Interests, posted today at discovery.com.
A group of researchers at the University of Michigan has gone over Olympic starting data and found that the sensors used for detecting false starts may be making some errant assumptions.
From the Discovery article:
In Olympic running events, false start detecting technologies cry foul when runners apply a certain amount of pressure to the starting blocks within the first 100 milliseconds (or one one-hundredth of a second) after the firing of the start gun. The basis for that criteria came from a 1990 study of eight Finnish sprinters, all men and none as elite as Olympic athletes.
The result, the researchers say, is that lighter people may have an advantage, as do those with less forceful starts.
It should be interesting to see whether the IOC leaves things the same, tweaks things, or scraps everything for another approach -- RFIDs tracking movement, for example.
