Tie In Olympic Skiing Race?
There was a tie for the gold medal in the Olympics in the women's downhill skiing event. Times are to the 1/100th of a second. The bronze medalist was 0.10 seconds behind, which the announcer said translated to 8' 9". So that means that 0.01 seconds would cover about 10.5", and it is possible that one of the tied gold medalists could have won the race by as much as 10.5", since these times are not exact and in increments of 0.01 seconds. If this was a track and field event like the 100m dash, if 2 runners had the same time the difference can be up to about 4 inches, and they would have no problem determining who was won. In swimming, they have to touch a sensor, and the controversial race that Michael Phelps won was much closer than 0.01 seconds (personally I think he lost).
I understand that you can't have a photo finish because the skiers don't ski at the same time, but I would think that the technology exists to get the times much more accurately, at least to 0.001 seconds, maybe to 0.0001 seconds. If you want to be nice and say that if the times were the same to the 1/100th of a second, it was so close that both athletes deserve to win, then they should do this in all timed events. I've never seen anything like this before. You can have ties in weightlifting when both people lift the same weight, and you can have ties in the high jump if both people jump over the bar at the same height because we don't take into account how far over the bar they went. You can also have ties in a judged event like gymnastics or figure skating, because the judges can give 2 people the same scores. But for anything that is timed, someone has to finish faster, even if it is by a billionth of a second.
The only reason I can see for a tie is if the timing equipment is limited in accuracy. If someone is standing at the bottom of the hill with a stopwatch, it would be unreasonable to expect accuracy of more than 0.1 seconds due to human reaction time, and that's what they did up until about 40-50 years ago before they had sophisticated electronic timing. I also understand why sports use official times to the 1/100th of a second, because going any further than that isn't really important for most people and is very rarely necessary to determine who won. And two people can share a world record for finishing at the same time (in different races), even though in reality if you went to more decimal places, someone had to have a faster time.
Is it possible that the timing equipment really is only capable of going to the 1/100th of a second? When there is a tie in a track and field or swimming event and they get the time to more decimal places, is that the actual time, or are they really just calculating the time difference based on a photo? In that case a tie would make sense, but I thought that the equipment was more accurate than that. My other thought was that they were able to go to 3 or 4 decimal places and the times were still tied, but if that happened, I think the announcers would have discussed it.
Please let me know why this race was declared a tie and why nothing more was done to figure out who really won.
I'm not bitter about anything. The U.S. competitor did lousy and didn't come close. In real life, if two people did a really good job and both were rewarded for their efforts, that's great. I'm generally not against being nice, I'm a liberal and want to see all people do well in life. It is a nice story that both won, but the Olympics aren't about nice stories, it's about competition. Sports are different than real life. In some athletic competitions there may be no way to avoid a tie. But in a timed race, someone is going to finish the fastest, and presumably we have the technology to determine who was faster, so I don't understand why it isn't being used. I've heard of dead heats in horse racing, but they go to a photo finish, people examine the photo, and they still can't figure out whose nose crossed the line first. I think in those rare cases the time difference had to be far less than 1/100th of a second.
All I'm saying is
Found the answer in this article in The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/sports/olympics/womens-downhill-historic-tie.html?_r=0
They do record the time to the 1/10,000th of a second (4 decimal places, 0.0001 seconds), but the rules are that they have to report it to the 1/100th of a second. This rule of from the F.I.S., which governs skiing. The article mentions that speed skating determines the winner if there is more accurate timing, and I never heard of any other sport that allows ties when a winner can be determined.