Today is the 40th Anniversary of Mark Spitz winning his 7 gold medals at the 1972 Olympics. A story is posted here
www.swimmingworldmagazine.com/.../31884.asp
To celebrate this accomplishment ESPN Classic TV station is showing all of the USA Gold medal winning swimmers today including all of Mark Spitz's races. Its on right now and will be on tonight. Its on for about 3 hours.
Whats interesting is to see the suits, no goggles, and basically no underwater swimming on either the starts or the turns.
One of the races they did not show was the Men's 400 IM in which Gunnar Larson and Tim McKee tied to the one hundredth of a second and had to dismantle the timing system and awarded the gold medal to Larson because his time was 2 thousands of a second faster.
I've heard this story before and I never understood why the timing system needed to be "dismantled" to get the result to the thousandth. In any event, here's a good writeup about that event:
olympics.swimnewslibrary.com/.../
Swimming has now progressed to the point where the top two women this summer in London (Ye Shiwen and Liz Beisel) were faster than McKee and Larsson.
One of the races they did not show was the Men's 400 IM in which Gunnar Larson and Tim McKee tied to the one hundredth of a second and had to dismantle the timing system and awarded the gold medal to Larson because his time was 2 thousands of a second faster.
I've heard this story before and I never understood why the timing system needed to be "dismantled" to get the result to the thousandth. In any event, here's a good writeup about that event:
olympics.swimnewslibrary.com/.../
Swimming has now progressed to the point where the top two women this summer in London (Ye Shiwen and Liz Beisel) were faster than McKee and Larsson.
