The Race History is not difficult to forge. It's just a printout. Anything along the way is not hard to forge. Heck, you can fake out a touchpad with a button trivially if you want to.
This is why there are humans involved. We trust Walt to make sure the supporting paperwork is appropriate. If I send in something that doesn't make sense, he'll ask, and we'll explain. Heck, in a non-record situation, I had a swimmer appeal to the USMS Officials Committee about my decision to invalidate a touchpad time in an event and use the (adjusted) button, for a _competitor_. The result of my invalidating the touchpad time for the competitor was that the competitor won race by a few hundredths. (The pad times said swimmer A beat swimmer B by a few tenths. The buttons said that swimmer B won. The watches said that swimmer B won. The place judge said that swimmer B won. Based on that, we declared a pad malfunction for swimmer B, and used an adjusted button, which had swimmer B win. Swimmer A appealed.)
The end result is that the paperwork needs to all tell a consistent story. If there's an anomaly, we dig deeper.
-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.
Yes. I had a conversation with Charlie Cockrell (Officials chair) about this very issue. He said that 3 timers are only needed if they are the *primary* timing system.
So I wondered why at meets that have 2 timers/lane, there are often instructions that you should request a third timer if you are going for a record? I forgot to ask Charlie this, but I think the reason is that sometimes the pad simply fails to register. Or possibly a swimmer misses the pad. If there is NO time, then an adjustment is not possible and you need the 3 timers.
I usually process 2-3 records each year at my meet. If the electronic timing is working, you just have to submit the CTS printouts and heat sheet to show heat and lane. Fortunately, I have never had to use watch times. It would be hard to go back after the meet and figure who was timing which lane.
One year a swimmer broke a record but the pad did not register. We figured the adjusted time from the buttons and submitted it. Walt used the printouts and corrected the way we had adjusted the time. Good service!
Touchpads with manual watches as backups. These are the instructions on the record form:
"Attach the printout showing event number, heat number, splits, backup from the electronic timing system and/or time card with the signatures of all three timers."
I interpreted the "and" as saying that I needed to submit both the backup from the electronic timing system, AND the time card with the signatures of all three timers.
Perhaps Chris can clarify. I recall frantically running around at the end of one meet, trying to find the timers for a certain lane after we realized that a record had been set.
I remember in our meets, the head timer often starts running around frantically looking for a third timer, when we have someone who *might* set a world record.
Mark and the meet admin and officials tend to be in charge of that part at our meets, rather then me, so I don't know if it's a requirement, or if he wants to be safe rather then sorry. I do remember being dragged off from whatever I am doing at the time, to be the third timer myself.
