The anti-sandbag law:
"if a swimmer enters an event with a time significantly slower or faster than that swimmer's recorded time in the past two years, the meet director may, after a discussion with the swimmer, change the seeded time to a realistic time" (104.5.5.A(10)).
Concerning my Auburn nationals entry, I confess, when faced with a 7 hour 2 stop flight and 3:45 nonstop at an earlier time, I did what any warm-blooded middle-aged American swimmer with low self-esteem would do--sandbag my entry so I could catch the earlier flight, thus diminishing the possible time spent sitting next to a 400 pound Alabama slammer with sleep apnea wearing nothing but overalls and body odor. Of course, I was caught in my bold fabrication and my time was "fixed."
USMS seems to have an identity problem. Are we hard core with rigid qualifying times? It would seem not as 2 of my not-so-speedy family members were allowed to swim four events last year in Puerto Rico. If we are not hard core, why does anybody care that I sandbag? More to the point, why can one person enter a crappy time and another cannot? Just wondering.:)
none of us, not a single darn one of us (no matter how "right" we think we are and how "wrong" we think others are) truly knows how their performance will pan out and therefore how close their entry time will be to their final time.
Come now, this is overstating it by quite a lot. There will always be uncertainty, but I can predict with some pretty decent accuracy (generally within a second) what my time in a 100 will be in a given meet.
I have seen the meet reports in your blog. You know what time you've done, when you did it, and what suit you did it in, and probably what your training had been like when you did it. Are you saying now that you have NO earthly idea at all what you will do in a given meet?
Sandbagging isn't a failure to nail your time exactly (or coming "reasonably" close). It is entering a time that you know is slower than you will be so that you can control the time of your swim or get more clear water or both.
Invoking uncertainty on this matter is a cop out. It's like saying, since your speedometer isn't certified to NIST standards, you can speed as much as you want. Because, who knows? Even if your speedometer says you are 20 mph above the limit, maybe it is wrong, maybe you aren't REALLY speeding.
And it seems pretty clear from Kurt's original post that he must have entered a time much slower than he expected to go so that he could swim significantly earlier than otherwise. I don't know the specifics but I'm betting it wasn't a matter of 5-10 seconds slower than he thought he would go. The sandbagging police are simply not that strict, for one thing.
(Disclaimer: still not judging.)
none of us, not a single darn one of us (no matter how "right" we think we are and how "wrong" we think others are) truly knows how their performance will pan out and therefore how close their entry time will be to their final time.
Come now, this is overstating it by quite a lot. There will always be uncertainty, but I can predict with some pretty decent accuracy (generally within a second) what my time in a 100 will be in a given meet.
I have seen the meet reports in your blog. You know what time you've done, when you did it, and what suit you did it in, and probably what your training had been like when you did it. Are you saying now that you have NO earthly idea at all what you will do in a given meet?
Sandbagging isn't a failure to nail your time exactly (or coming "reasonably" close). It is entering a time that you know is slower than you will be so that you can control the time of your swim or get more clear water or both.
Invoking uncertainty on this matter is a cop out. It's like saying, since your speedometer isn't certified to NIST standards, you can speed as much as you want. Because, who knows? Even if your speedometer says you are 20 mph above the limit, maybe it is wrong, maybe you aren't REALLY speeding.
And it seems pretty clear from Kurt's original post that he must have entered a time much slower than he expected to go so that he could swim significantly earlier than otherwise. I don't know the specifics but I'm betting it wasn't a matter of 5-10 seconds slower than he thought he would go. The sandbagging police are simply not that strict, for one thing.
(Disclaimer: still not judging.)
