PARIS - In the chaotic aftermath of the impossibly close men’s 100-meter final on the Stade de France track Sunday night - as American Noah Lyles, Jamaican Kishane Thompson and nearly 80,000 spectators waited to find out who had won - the machinery, technology and human engineers behind what is often described as the most advanced timing system in sports went to work.
As everyone stood by for a result that was imperceptible to the naked eye or even initial television replay, on-site judges reviewed timing devices capable of recording times to the tiniest fractions of seconds and consulted photos from three high-speed cameras filming every race at 40,000 frames per second.
Finally, they determined that, while both sprinters had posted identical times of 9.79 in the traditional way in which track times are expressed, Lyles had actually won the race, and thus the gold medal, by a mere five-thousandths of a second, 9.784 to 9.789. (By rule, times are rounded up.) The review took nearly three times as long as the race itself.
Meanwhile, any swimmer watching on television in the Olympic Village or somewhere around town would have immediately understood a critical difference between the sports:
In swimming, that would have been a tie for gold.
The difference between the way the sports settle their narrowest margins of victory is less a conscious choice than a matter of science or even math.
In most land-based sports, competitors cross a laser beam at the finish line to register their times. According to Omega Timing, the official timekeeper of the Olympics, it has the capability to determine times to the millionth of a second. In track, times are expressed only to the hundredths, but officials will go out to the thousandths to break ties.
“Metrology is a very clear and definite science,” said Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, track and field’s international governing body. “And you need to make sure that if you have that technology, you use it.”
In swimming, competitors stop the clock by activating a touch pad at the ends of their lanes. In a case where two swimmers appear to touch at once, even the most advanced cameras possible would have difficulty determining when each touched with enough pressure to activate the sensor. And while the technology exists to measure times to the thousandths of seconds, they stop at the hundredths in swimming.
“For swimming, in a pool with water as the medium, it becomes super tricky to go to such a degree of specificity,” said Mike Unger, former chief operating officer of USA Swimming and now senior adviser for World Aquatics, the sport’s international governing body. “The ability is there. The timers can do that, absolutely. But that [100-meter track race] would have ended in a tie in swimming.
“You don’t want to go beyond the hundredths of a second, because it’s an inexact science.”
The reasons for the discrepancy have to do with some inherent differences between the sports and the facilities. Without the benefit of a laser to register the finish line, the engineers and architects who build swimming pools have to try to get the length as close to 50 meters as humanly possible. (Actually, they shoot for 50.02 meters for the shell of the pool, with the addition of the touchpads accounting for the additional two centimeters.)
Because it would be too expensive and time-consuming to require builders to construct pools to, say, exactly 50.000 meters - and because those dimensions could vary from point to point based on factors such as water temperature, ambient temperature and the number of people in the water - World Aquatics permits a “dimensional tolerance” (or degree of variance from lane to lane) of up to one centimeter.
Here’s where math comes into play. At the absolute fastest a human can move through the water - using the current men’s 50-meter freestyle world record, the 20.91 seconds of Brazilian Cesar Cielo in 2009, as the baseline - he would travel 2.39 millimeters in one-thousandth of a second. Considering that, one can see why a dimensional tolerance of one centimeter makes it impractical and unscientific to consider times to the thousandth of a second.
Timing the hundredth of a second “is already extremely precise,” said Alain Zobrist, the CEO of Swiss Timing, the Olympic timekeeping arm of Omega. And if you can’t guarantee the length of each lane is exactly 50 meters, he said, “that would be considered unfair to the athletes.”
Every sport decides how precise it wants its timekeeping to be, according to Zobrist. Track cycling, for example, uses thousandths of a second as its standard, while triathlon expresses times only in seconds.
Swimming has not always been unwilling to break ties by going out to the thousandths of seconds. At the 1972 Olympics, when American Tim McKee and Sweden’s Gunnar Larsson posted identical times of 4:31.98 in the 400 individual medley, officials took the times out to the next decimal point - which already was possible with the timing systems in place then - to pronounce Larsson the gold medalist by .002.
Afterward, swimming’s governing body changed the rule, limiting timing to the hundredth of a second and declaring ties in instances such as the 400 IM in 1972. It did not, however, retroactively declare that race a tie and award McKee the gold medal he would have earned under the new rule.
Since then, ties for medals have been commonplace in high-level swimming. At the Paris 2024 meet, American Nic Fink and Britain’s Adam Peaty tied for second in the men’s 100 breaststroke, and both received silver medals, with no bronze awarded. More famously, Americans Gary Hall Jr. and Anthony Ervin shared golds with matching 21.98s in the 50 freestyle in 2000, and American sprinter Simone Manuel tied for gold with Canada’s Penny Oleksiak at 52.70 in the women’s 100 free in 2016.
“Sometimes,” Unger said, “it can come down to whether or not you cut your fingernails that morning.”
In other instances, such as ties for eighth when only the top eight advance to a final, those swimmers have to race a swim-off to determine who gets the spot. But those rules are pliable, especially in cases where the swim-off results in yet another tie.
There have been instances in which the swimmers and their coaches have agreed to settle the matter with a coin toss or even a game of rock-paper-scissors - permissible under a USA Swimming rule that states swimmers, coaches and the meet referee can agree to “resolve the tie in an alternate manner” of their choosing.
In February 2023, at a high-level youth meet in Geneva, two 14-year-olds tied at 28.99 in the prelims of the 50 butterfly with a finals spot on the line, according to swimming website swimswam.com. A swim-off resulted in another tie, at 28.69. Rather than make the boys swim a third time, the coaches agreed to an alternate manner to break the tie:
They consulted the timers and went out another decimal point - still a tie - then another. Finally, the times expressed to the ten-thousandth of a second determined the winner, Rafael de Sousa Carvalho of Switzerland, with a 28.6909.
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Rick Maese and Adam Kilgore contributed to this report.
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