I just read that the men's 200 MR was DQd at Worlds. That race could've given Phelps a record 8th gold medal... bummer.
Phelps was very gracious about it. He said, "We came in here as a team, we exit as a team."
Sigh.
PS Did you see the size of his HANDS! I would like to swim just one race with hands his size, and feet the size of Thorpe's. (Yep, I have puny little paws!)
I was thinking about this and realized you know what ... baseball players, get 3 strikes, there is no equivalent in swimming. Football players get 4 downs, no equivalent in swimming, basketball players have so many opportunities to score, as do hockey players. There is no equivalent in swimming you can't make a mistake, that's brutal ...
Baseball players get 3 strikes and still strike out, and we don't call them incompetent fools every time and say how they should never be allowed to play the game again ... football teams don't score on every drive ... so why is it fair to have these ridiculously high standards for swimmers? How can we expect HUMANS to be perfect?
I'm not too sure what someone meant by "Crocker should lay down for Phelps." Please explain. :)
Dan is your last name Hoff? Are you related to Katie? If so, please tell her congratulations!
Fat?!? That's just absurd. What's his body fat? 13%? (I don't know, I'm guessing) OOOH, the porker! You've got to be kidding me, fat, come on.
Keep in mind swimming is one of the more forgiving sports when extra weight is put on, as fat floats. I don't recommend being fat. And with the birth of three kids in recent years, I certainly have struggled to get rid of the belly fat, but I would NEVER call swimmers at Crocker's level fat :confused:
so why is it fair to have these ridiculously high standards for swimmers? How can we expect HUMANS to be perfect?
Not false starting is a ridiculously high standard? Perfection would be a relay exchange of exactly zero seconds. We don't expect that nor would a coach even want a swimmer to cut it that close.
Kirk all I was getting at is that we can't expect athletes to be perfect, they make errors, too. Expecting them to be perfect is holding them to too high of a standard.
Anyone know when the last time Ian swam that relay and wasn't diving in after Hansen? I can't remember it, probably was an exchange to Moses?? It's been awhile and his timing was off ... freakin' move on people! Geez ...
Crocker may have wanted a great split - but he didn't need to push the start to achieve it. The timing system reports the start delay in addition to the actual split time. So it is easy to determine the actual split time minus the start delay.
RacerX - It is very common in international meets for the USA to use a different lineup in prelims when they are confident they'll make finals. They want the A team to rest. The lineup for finals was surely Piersol, Hansen, Phelps, and Lezak.
Crocker made a huge and silly mistake. The typical reaction time on a flat start is .75 seconds or so - Crocker really pushed it when he should not have. I do not believe it was intentional. He is a competitor and a team swimmer. His mistake cost his UT and TXLA teammates Piersol, Hansen, and Walker their shot at medals in addition to Phelps, Lochte, and Lezak. Crocker has to come home to Austin and swim with his buddies.
Fortress, I think of Crocker as that fat guy who swims fast. I once had him as my wallpaper just to kid my wife who is always bothering me about getting rid of neck or chin fat. Well, guess what? Crocker has that. Last week I got beaten by a guy by decimals in a 50 free. The guy looked old, was fatter than me, had lots of white hair, no visible muscles, and so forth; yet as a forum member says, the clock does not lie! I went over and asked him, where he'd been the last couple of years, and he said he hadn't been swimming any, but now he was swimming twice weekly so he decided to join the masters thing here in my home state of Goiás. He might have been a fast swimmer in the past and 50 meters is just speed, not much anything else. Well, at least I know I have a better time by two seconds than the one last week. I hope to regain it and hope he has done his best. billy fanstone
If FINA is using an electric false start sensor, The .03 (not .04) is probably allowed as a makeup error to compensate for differing lengths of wire, connections, position of toes on the block, whatever. Either way, it is the rule, and every one in the race is using the same allowance.
I've heard this before about putting in some kind of correction to account for the length of wire and it never made sense to me. The speed of light is 3x10^8 m/s, so in .01 seconds light travels 3x10^6 meters. Yes, 3 million meters. Those wire lengths would really have to be different! :)
My understanding is that the correction is there because the pressure switches show a lack of pressure while the swimmer is still in contact because the pressure decreases in the last moment of contact even though there is contact. There was a study done using high speed cameras and the pads to see what the typical values were. Then they decided on a "fair" value to cover all cases. Some systems automatically delete this fudge factor while others do not.
Also, propagation delays are not caused by the distance of the wire per se. They are brought about by induction and capacitance in the line. When I spoke with one of the major timing vendors, they admitted they had never studied the issue.
Leo
