Really silly inquiry regarding the barrier in a 50m pool.

That comes out to 0.230 second (less than one-quarter second) per 1650 (Well, at least at the 100y pace suggested above). Obviously it is "measurable." But handheld/manual timing can error that much. Ridiculous! Someone who is actually paying attention and knows how to use a stopwatch should never have an error of nearly a quarter second on a time. If you can't get within a tenth of a second you just aren't trying. And, yes, I realize the problem in meets is that many of the manual timers truly aren't trying very hard. I swam a long course 400 one time where I finished and knew the time on the readout board was wrong (too fast). Neither of my manual timers got a good watch time and in fact one forgot to start their watch so admitted they just wrote down the time they saw on the board. That sort of defeats the purpose!! I talked to the meet officials and the only solution they could offer me was to let me swim it again later in the meet, so that's what I had to do. If I hadn't said anything I'm sure they just would have assumed the electronic time was accurate.

That comes out to 0.230 second (less than one-quarter second) per 1650 (Well, at least at the 100y pace suggested above). Obviously it is "measurable." But handheld/manual timing can error that much. Ridiculous! Someone who is actually paying attention and knows how to use a stopwatch should never have an error of nearly a quarter second on a time. If you can't get within a tenth of a second you just aren't trying. And, yes, I realize the problem in meets is that many of the manual timers truly aren't trying very hard. I swam a long course 400 one time where I finished and knew the time on the readout board was wrong (too fast). Neither of my manual timers got a good watch time and in fact one forgot to start their watch so admitted they just wrote down the time they saw on the board. That sort of defeats the purpose!! I talked to the meet officials and the only solution they could offer me was to let me swim it again later in the meet, so that's what I had to do. If I hadn't said anything I'm sure they just would have assumed the electronic time was accurate.