One interesting note... and I need to check the USA Swimming rulebook more closely for a reference. In all my workings with nationally-certified USA Swimming admin refs, they repeatedly pointed out that when using touchpads (i.e., automatic primary system), in the event of a pad malfunction, a corrected time (i.e., adjusted/calculated button, etc.) is then considered an automatic time.
I.e., if you're running a meet with touchpads, with one backup timer per lane, and have a pad malfunction on a finish... if you make the appropriate correction to the single button time, then that corrected/adjusted time is considered an automatic time for the purposes of the rules, records, etc.
I.e., if you have a pad malfunction, and correctly adjust a button time following the procedures, even with just a single button, then that should be sufficient for a record.
I don't think that's ever happened in our meet (needing to use an adjusted button for a record). However, based on my use of the record application form... if that happened, we likely wouldn't have the signature of the timer available. (We wouldn't put 2 and 2 together to even know it was a record until later in most cases.)
This of course also just gets to... at some point, we do need to trust that everyone is honest. If anyone really wanted to, it would be trivial to forge a timing system printout for any time that I wanted to for any swimmer that you wanted to.
-Rick
One interesting note... and I need to check the USA Swimming rulebook more closely for a reference. In all my workings with nationally-certified USA Swimming admin refs, they repeatedly pointed out that when using touchpads (i.e., automatic primary system), in the event of a pad malfunction, a corrected time (i.e., adjusted/calculated button, etc.) is then considered an automatic time.
I.e., if you're running a meet with touchpads, with one backup timer per lane, and have a pad malfunction on a finish... if you make the appropriate correction to the single button time, then that corrected/adjusted time is considered an automatic time for the purposes of the rules, records, etc.
I.e., if you have a pad malfunction, and correctly adjust a button time following the procedures, even with just a single button, then that should be sufficient for a record.
I don't think that's ever happened in our meet (needing to use an adjusted button for a record). However, based on my use of the record application form... if that happened, we likely wouldn't have the signature of the timer available. (We wouldn't put 2 and 2 together to even know it was a record until later in most cases.)
This of course also just gets to... at some point, we do need to trust that everyone is honest. If anyone really wanted to, it would be trivial to forge a timing system printout for any time that I wanted to for any swimmer that you wanted to.
-Rick
