Jumping the gun
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This week is the start of the World Athletics Championships in Hungary. It's the biggest track and field competition of the year. And we wanted to bring you an episode we first made during last year's championships, when what seemed like it should be the simplest possible rule led to a full-blown scandal. That is as tough a break as I have ever seen in this sport. The controversy got to the heart of one of the most basic questions in sports. When does a race actually start?

There's confident, and then there's Tynia Gaither. When I was younger, I used to beat up on the boys in PE, and ever since then, like, I've been addicted to what I do. What she does is sprint for Team Bahamas at the highest level. I love the adrenaline rush that I get every time I line up. I love making my family and my country proud. I love making my family and my country proud.

I wouldn't choose any other career for myself right now. Last July, Tainia was gearing up for a huge race in Oregon. This was the World Championships, which is the biggest championship that we have as professional sprinters for the year. Tainia had been training for months, day after day, to get ready for this championship.

and she'd reached the semifinals of the 100-meter dash. These moments are everything to us. It was a beautiful day, high 70s, clear blue sky. Got out on the track, everything was perfect. I was really zoned in to this race because I knew what I was capable of. I knew that I was ready to run the race of my life.

She lined up in the second lane. And Tania was locked in. She made sure to do her pre-race ritual.

I slap my legs and I throw my arms up in the air and throw them back over my head and just do like a little shimmy with my shoulders. Then I get into the blocks. She sat up in the blocks, one leg in front, one leg behind, with both her hands on the ground in front of her. I heard the crowd go quiet. Of course, you can hear, you know, a few murmurs or whatever, but that's normal. And, you know, when everybody gets set and still, only when everybody's still, they'll stay set.

And you'll come up in your set position. And then I heard the gun go off. And I took off. And then I heard the gun go off again. And then I stopped. At this point, it was all confusion. That second gun was officials stopping the race because someone had broken a rule. No, I'm not sure I can see that to the naked eye either.

It's a bit hard to hear, but behind the voices of the commentators, you can just make out an in-stadium announcement. False start, line two. A false start means that Tania didn't wait for the gun before she reacted. She started too early. I couldn't believe it because I just knew it wasn't me. There was no way. I've never false started ever in my life.

After a false start, all the runners have to line up again and restart. But without Tainiya this time, because once you false start, you're immediately disqualified. I thought it was an error. It wasn't immediately obvious to the naked eye. I'd quite like to see that again. I knew I started once I heard that gun go off. That one was so tight, I think it was indiscernible. The crowd was like, "No, no, like, you didn't false start." Crowd don't like it. They were like, "Protest, protest, no, you didn't do anything."

And then I was like, okay, you know, I'd like to protest. Okay, so this might take a little while. Tainia walked off the track to make her case to the official. And he has a little screen that shows him the video replay. Wow, that's so magical. That's really hard to tell with the naked eye. Literally looked like I did nothing wrong. But the official wasn't just looking at the replay. He also showed me my reaction time, and it was like lit up in red, which means, you know, basically the start was just too fast.

Pressure sensors in the starting blocks showed that Tainia had started 0.093 seconds after the gun went off. After the gun went off. Like, I'm mind blown. You're telling me I'm penalized for something I did after the gun went off? Just a reminder, I know many of you will be familiar with this. If it's quicker than a tenth of a second, it's deemed to be illegal.

Tainia was officially disqualified for reacting 7 thousandths of a second quicker than the legal limit. According to what they were trying to tell us, no human can possibly move that fast without anticipating it. The officials were saying that because it's impossible to react within a tenth of a second, Tainia must have started before the gun went off, even if no one could see it. They were basically telling Tainia, "You didn't wait for the gun to go off before you started."

You cheated. You guessed. There was no guessing in my start. My coach trains us to wait until we hear the start. In fact, sometimes she'll hold it extra long for us just to see if we would jump out the block. So we train to make sure that we don't throw away our opportunities. Tainia wasn't the only one who was disqualified for a false start after the gun at these world championships.

It happened to Julian Alfred, who started .095 seconds after the gun. She's right in the center of your picture in the white, yes? It's very, very, very marginal. And then it happened to Devin Allen, who started .099 seconds after the gun. And he is faster than that tenth of a second allowance. You know how much faster he is? By one thousandth of a second. I just saw the start official say, "I'm sorry."

All three of these sprinters started after the gun, and all three of them were disqualified in some of the biggest races of the year. I really don't like seeing people disqualified. Having said that, rules are rules, aren't they? You're right. But I just couldn't understand what they were saying. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, how fast can humans react? And is a rule like this actually fair?

Okay, Brian. No. There's this rule in running that we've both been thinking about for a while. Yeah. It's designed to prevent people from guessing when the gun goes off. And it all relies on the assumption that it's impossible to react in less than a tenth of a second. That people who start that quickly are actually starting in their heads before the gun. So I wanted to ask you about the science here. Like, does this idea of a limit to human reaction time make sense?

Yes, the concept behind this rule does make sense. You can't react instantly to a sound.

There is a neurophysiological limit that needs to be defined to prevent some athletes to have an unfair advantage by anticipating the gain. So I found a scientist who's doing his PhD on this exact question. His name is Mathieu Milloz. My name is Mathieu Milloz. He's French, so I apologize if I've said his name wrong. And he thinks this idea of setting a limit makes sense because

reacting to a gun just takes time. There's so many things that need to happen just to get you out of the starting blocks. There is like different components to the response time. So first, the gun goes off.

There's time it takes for that sound of the gun to get into your ears. So there is the time. Your ears have to convert that stimulus into a neural signal. Then there is the time. Your nervous system has to identify that signal. The time. Send a command down to your muscles to start moving, and that takes some time. And then there's time for the muscle itself to start contracting, to move. And then there is...

Like you actually exerting force on the starting blocks that would detect your movement. So there is all these different components. It's complex. So this idea of a limit in sprinting makes sense. But what I just cannot figure out is where this number, tenth of a second, where does that come from?

So I looked into this. I talked to a historian who wrote a report about this for World Athletics, which is the organization that runs these world championships we've been talking about. His name is PJ Wiesel. And he told me that it actually traces all the way back to the 60s and this West German sprinter named Armin Hari.

He had surging power and explosive pace. But he also possessed the most dubious starting technique that international sprinting has ever seen. Parry was famous for being a suspiciously fast starter. His fellow Germans called him the thief of starts. He did apparently have a really fast reaction time. They tested him, though we don't know exactly how accurate that was. Many believe he actually beats the gun.

Ultimately, we don't know if Hari was guessing his starts or if he just had superhuman reflexes.

But in 1960, he won a bunch of races, got called for some false starts, and people were pissed because back then, you know, you didn't get immediately disqualified for your first false start. They would just run the race again. Oh, okay. So it got a little messy. And West Germany, you know, they wanted something more objective, so they got these force sensors that could automatically detect when someone started. And this tenth of a second limit basically comes from the company that designed them. Did it.

The traditional brand Hume-Hans has been a trailblazer and watch design for 160 years. That said that they had tested a bunch of runners and found that no one could start faster than a tenth of a second. Okay. So that sort of like company finding became the basis for this rule of thumb that continued for a couple decades until 1989 when World Athletics, then known as IAAF, made it official.

So when Tainio was disqualified and told, "You couldn't have possibly started that fast," that was just based on something a German company said in the 1960s.

Yeah, basically. Okay. That's what this historian told me. World Athletics has said it's based on science. So I reached out to them and they told me that a tenth of a second was determined to be the quote, minimum auditory reaction time. But they didn't point to a specific study. Okay. The main study that other people point to is this study on eight amateur sprinters, which is just a really small sample size. And

And it also seems like the study came out after they made the rule. So I just basically have a ton of questions about the science here. Okay, so this whole story you're telling me makes perfect sense considering when I asked Mathieu about this number, like, do you think it's valid? He told me...

He argues that this tenth of a second limit is just not based in rigorous science. And we really don't know what the actual number is, what the limit ought to be. If you look at the scientific literature, you can find there have been a bunch of studies that try to answer the question how fast someone can start a race. And they all kind of find slightly different numbers.

People can start faster than 0.1 seconds. Mathieu says he's even found this in his own work. I'm sure that you can react faster

in less than 100 milliseconds in Spring Start. And there's no paper you can go to that has the gold standard for studying how fast people can start. There's a lot of small studies on this. They find different numbers. So there's just not a lot of confidence from the scientific community that World Athletics has a

correct, firm number here. Yeah, I actually came across a study that was commissioned by World Athletics itself in 2009. And that study said the tenth of a second limit is incorrect. Oh, so they know this? Apparently. And I asked them about that, but they said this study was too small to actually merit a rule change. So do a better study. Right. I mean, given that all of these

studies are so small, it makes me wonder, like, is reaction time in a race a particularly hard thing to study? When I asked Matthew about this, he explained it as very complicated. There are just a lot of variables to control for. So one thing here is that depending on how loud the start sound is,

People might start faster. Like a startle response or something? Yeah, well, it's just like if it's louder, people seem to start faster. And then the longer the official wait, the faster the start times can be because you're just so ready to start. It's like a spring being coiled up or something? Yeah. And then when it comes to these sensors themselves, apparently...

How they decide when a starts happens can be very variable between sensors. There doesn't seem to be enough consistency here in either the science or the practice to really exactly nail down a number. So if this tenth of a second limit isn't based on rigorous science, do we have a sense of what a better general area of rightness might be?

So I asked Mathieu this question, and he said, "If I give you a number now, I will kind of lie to you." If I gave you a number, I would be lying to you. If you look around, there are some scientists who have done some back-of-the-napkin calculations, that whole list of things that I outlined that need to happen before you can start a race. Some say that could take 85 milliseconds, so 15 milliseconds faster than what is allowed.

But then again, like, you know, Mathieu was, he was very insistent on there's, like, there's no perfect way to measure anything. So any measurement is going to come with some range of error. At the same time, Mathieu thinks it's important to get a better range of what the limit could be because the victories here can be decided by hundreds, thousands of a second. The margin of victory is so small in SpringZot.

I think it's worth to try to improve this. —Metsu basically thinks that improving on this number and getting a better estimate of it will really make races fairer.

So is there a way to get a better sense of what this limit might be? Or is it just too many moving parts? He just wants to make this research a lot more rigorous. Okay. He really wants to take the fastest elite athletes and bring them into the lab. So not amateurs anymore. Yeah, not using amateurs. Top-level sprinters react...

It turns out on the track, like during a competition, there's some evidence that suggests that runners are not starting as fast as they possibly could because they just don't want to risk false starting. Ah.

That's why he wants to bring them to the lab and say, okay, everyone, don't worry about false starts. We just want to see how fast you could possibly start and just collect a lot of data on some of the fastest people in the world. He wants to make sure researchers can control for all those variables with the sensors and really just find a gold standard to agree on that this is the best way to record a race start.

And then plot that data in a distribution curve and see really where we can better decide on where the limit is. Okay. He also thinks that we've been measuring sprint starts in just the wrong place. What do you mean? So far, we've been talking about the feet. Right. You know, like when your foot moves, like that's when the race starts. But he says like the actual first thing that moves when you start to run are your hands. Like you're crouched in the starting blocks. Your two hands are on the ground in front of you.

And you're pushing off with your hands. Yeah. Yeah, they push on the floor first. So that is the first movement you do. And like, he says that is much faster. I have a difference, an average difference, about 50 milliseconds between the impulse in the legs and the impulse on the floor that react first. So that's like a huge difference. Yeah. Maybe that's where we should decide where the race starts. So that all sounds great. Great.

Okay. But to be honest, like, I'm not actually sure more science and more technology is the whole answer here. Isn't the answer usually more science? We need more science? Don't we say that on this show like every week? It's definitely often science. But when it comes to sports, I mean, I think using technology in the name of fairness...

It's harder than you think. And there's an argument that sort of a hyper focus on technology might actually be ruining sports a bit. Oh, I want to hear that. I'll tell you after the break. Hey, unexplainable listeners. Sue Bird here. And I'm Megan Rapinoe. Women's sports are reaching new heights these days. And there's so much to talk about and so much to explain. You mean, like, why do female athletes make less money on average than male athletes?

Great question. So, Sue and I are launching a podcast where we're going to deep dive into all things sports, and then some. We're calling it A Touch More. Because women's sports is everything. Pop culture, economics, politics, you name it. And there's no better folks than us to talk about what happens on the court or on the field.

and everywhere else too. And we're going to share a little bit about our lives together as well. Not just the cool stuff like Met Galas and All-Star Games, but our day-to-day lives as well. You say that like our day-to-day lives aren't glamorous. True. Whether it's breaking down the biggest games or discussing the latest headlines, we'll be bringing a touch more insight into the world of sports and beyond. Follow A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

Hi, everyone. This is Kara Swisher, host of On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We've had some great guests on the pod this summer, and we are not slowing down. Last month, we had MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on, then two separate expert panels to talk about everything going on in the presidential race, and there's a lot going on, and Ron Klang, President Biden's former chief of staff. And it keeps on getting better. This week, we have the one and only former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. As we get closer to the end of the year, we'll be talking about the

After the drama of the last two weeks and President Biden's decision to step out of the race, a lot of people think the speaker has some explaining to do. And I definitely went there with her, although she's a tough nut, as you'll find. The full episode is out now, and you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

So he yells out, ready, on your mark, get set. And I was so keyed up, I just took off. So we've got this rule that really seems to be unscientific, to say the least. Yeah. And honestly, kind of unfair. Mm-hmm. And there's rumblings that World Athletics might be considering changing it. A World Athletics Council member from Finland actually called for a rule change on this. And the president of World Athletics said...

And yeah, the false start rule I'm sure will be looked at by the competition commission and everything is on the table as it always is after a championship.

World Athletics actually sent me a great statement on this, which said, quote, it is standard procedure after each world championships for the World Athletics Competition Commission to review the championships and recommend any rule changes. So they're not saying anything. Not really. So until they do figure out how to change this, I guess I was wondering if

we could try to figure out how we might get to a perfectly fair race. Yeah, like, what are the options here? Okay, so on the one hand, we've got Machu, right? He wants to use more science, more technology to kind of get finer distinctions on this limit. You know, take this...

kind of non-scientific tenth of a second limit and bring it, you know, firmly into the realm of science, rigorous science, like you said. Yeah. And that's broadly what a lot of the people I spoke to also told me. So the historian I talked to, PJ, he said he wanted a lower, more precise limit. I talked to a sports scientist, Matt Payne, who said the same thing.

And they both said we also need more transparency around exactly how these machines work. Yeah. So, you know, we can hold them accountable. Yeah. We need to know, like, each machine is making the same decision around, like, when that person started. Right. And that's actually what some people think happened at the World Championships with Tainia and these other runners, that something must have been up with the machines because reaction times were just, like, super fast across the board. Mm-hmm.

And honestly, I think that's a key problem with having this really strictly enforced limit because applying this tiny distinction across tons of machines perfectly consistently without any error is clearly showing itself to be really difficult. Yeah. And it's also always possible that someone can come along, you know, with just superhuman reaction time and

and slightly, just slightly break this limit, whatever we find. Yeah, and the limit is always going to be a fuzzy number anyway. Right. And, you know, if you draw a clear line in the middle of what is ultimately just a fuzzy border...

and someone is barely on the other side of that clear line, like, is it really enough to label them a cheater? I don't know. Yeah. You know, like, technology doesn't necessarily make fuzzy borders go away. Sports have not been created or invented to deal with the technology that we have today. So I talked to the sports writer Joe Posnanski. He's written a lot about the use of technology in sports. Joe says that, like, technology can give us a lot more data, right?

But it's not always clear that more data equals more accuracy, especially when we're dealing with sort of fuzzy borders and sports, which are ultimately, they're games, right? They're not scientific experiments. There is a way to break down the context of any game

to a point where it's no longer a game, where it no longer makes any sense. It's kind of funny. We've been talking to scientists who the answer to this question is, well, we just need more precise sensors. We need better science. We need more, you know, data, data, data. And I'm sure that's fun for them. Right. Yeah. And Joe told me that it can cause some real problems.

In baseball, for example, it used to be that a guy stole a base and if the tag was late, he was safe. That's how that worked.

- A stolen base for Rios. - So as long as you're touching the base, you're safe. - That's the one thing I know about baseball. - Right, that's the main rule of baseball. - But now if you slow it down enough, you'll see that occasionally the guy, when he slides into second base. - Just for a fraction of a second. - For just a moment, watch this. - His foot will bounce off the bag.

for like the smallest amount. I mean, a millimeter. And what happens in baseball now sometimes is they go to this like instant replay review and then the ump's like, he's out now. That's not the way the game was intended to be played. Nobody ever even knew this existed. And they stopped the game for like a while. You know, instead it becomes this

People just pouring over it like it's the Zubruder film trying to figure out, is this guy safe? Is this guy out? It's not great. You know, I'm realizing that if we went the max technology limit and you actually got to an absurdly small view, you would see that actually we don't touch anything. Matter is mostly empty space. It's just electromagnetism that's convincing us we're touching, right? Yes. No runner is ever touching a base.

And no fielder is ever tagging a runner. This is a little... I think we got a little too deep for this topic. But I see what you mean in that, like, there's always going to be... Like, the closer you zoom into things, you see actually, like, our experience of that...

thing like touching a base is not necessarily what's happening on a microscopic view. Yeah, and it's not just baseball either. Like in basketball, there are these endless replay reviews on fouls. I get so bored of these replays. They've got a great game going. Again, it's a gray area of like, what is a foul? Is that an offensive foul or I don't know.

And then in football, there's this kind of like deeply philosophical issue of what is a catch? What? Yeah, like it used to be... Like it's in your hands? Yeah, it seems like this really simple idea. Like, are you holding the ball? But now it's like... The runner did not complete the catch during the process of the catch. Okay.

Okay. If you zoom in really close, is the ball moving a tiny little bit when you hit the ground? Even though it's in your hands? Even though it's in your hands. And even though it was always considered a catch before. And you've got to continue through the play. We will now review the previous play. I don't want to sound like technology is really bad. It has its place in sports, especially when the lines aren't as fuzzy.

So, like, who finishes a race first seems a lot easier to judge on replay than who started. Or like tennis, where, you know, whether a ball is in or out, like, that's a pretty clear decision. But using fancy technology and tons of camera angles on things like the start of a race or what is a catch in football, it can end up being really disappointing to fans because, you know, you're expecting this clear, objective result from all this technology, but

And it's just a fuzzy border. Technology can't solve this problem. Yeah, we signed up to come to a game, not to a slide presentation. Yeah, it's like something you would do in a lab. It's not something you want to do in an arena. So should we just throw out all the sensors, the cameras, everything, and just...

Just go out there and have fun. So I think there's a couple things we could do here. So we could throw out the limit entirely, like just go back to the eye test to see who false started. But this sports scientist I talked to told me that people's perception of movement can actually be different. So some people could actually be better at spotting movement in other people. Yeah.

We're introducing yet another complication to when does a race start? Yeah, and we could also keep these pressure sensors back

but just get rid of this tenth of a second reaction time limit. Like, just have the race start when the gun goes off and just say, that's it. That makes sense to me. You know, like, not giving people, you know, penalties for these apparent thought crimes that they, you know, started before the gun in their head. Right, that's intuitive, right? Like, that's what we think a race should be. But without this reaction time limit,

Both of these other options might actually incentivize runners to anticipate the gun, like to guess when the gun would go off. Is it a huge problem to anticipate the gun? Couldn't that just be a part of the race? Well, it's against the rules, for one thing. But it could also just make races super chaotic, like there'd be false starts and restarts all the time. I don't really think races would want to incentivize that.

Wouldn't runners still just get disqualified? There's still a big cost for jumping the gun. Yeah, there's a big cost, but the people I talked to said they think runners would risk it. Like, if you're racing someone who's just way faster than you and your only shot is to anticipate the gun...

you might just risk it, even if you could get disqualified. And then some people probably wouldn't risk it. So, you know, if we're looking for the fairest possible race, like one where every single person is being timed from the gun to the finish line, I don't really think the answer is taking away the limit and maybe encouraging people to jump the gun more. I think every option here will fail us in some way. It's just deciding...

which failure feels like sports. I think that's exactly right. And that's something that Joe said to me. He basically said, There's no way to make sports perfectly fair. What you want to do is make it fair enough that people have faith in it. But we accept the illusion.

So Joe's favorite solution for fuzzy borders in sports like baseball and football is just to accept the gray area. Let the official watch the replay in real time, no slow-mo. And if the call can't be overturned, just stick with the call in the field because perfectly fair isn't possible. Yeah, I think perfect fairness is impossible. But at least with this false start rule...

we could probably make it a little fairer. We definitely can, especially because we know this reaction time limit isn't right. So lowering the limit seems like a clear move. We can embrace the fact that we'll probably need to keep updating it over time. And then ultimately, if we're honest about the fact that when a race starts is kind of this fuzzy border, we'll end up labeling fewer people cheaters who probably didn't cheat. It's still embarrassing because...

You know, you don't want to ever be labeled as somebody that cheated. Tania is still thinking about her false start at the World Championships in July, when officials said she started before hearing the gun. I literally waited till I heard what I needed to hear, just like I've done in hundreds of other races. For a while, it was hard to shake.

You know, I haven't really shared this with many people, but I've kind of been experiencing a little PTSD with it. Because now when you know when I get in my blocks, I'm the only thing that I'm thinking about in my blocks is be patient. That's literally the thing that's been engraved in my head since that moment. Be patient because you can't afford for that to happen again. But Tania is nowhere close to giving up on running. I'm one of the true lovers of this sport. I love what I do. And you know,

As big of a blow as that was, it hasn't changed, you know, my eagerness to step on the line. And last August, she was back on the blocks at another big race. She took home a silver medal running a personal best in the 200-meter dash. But the thought of that false start after the gun in July, it's still lingering in the back of her head. So at the end of all this, I told her about our reporting and all the people we've talked to.

And I guess it doesn't seem to me like you cheated. Yes, that's how I feel. But I guess the data says I cheated. And, you know, I think based on the science here, we have good reason to say Tynia Gaither is not a cheater. Wow. Well, I really appreciate that. I would love for the world to see that research. Since we first ran the story last year, World Athletics has changed their rules.

Really slightly. So now, if there's any doubt about the call from the automated system, referees can allow athletes to run and then appeal afterwards. So it's a little more flexible. But starting faster than a tenth of a second is still considered to be a false start. So no huge changes here.

This episode was reported and produced by Noam Hassenfeld and me, Brian Resnick. It was edited by Meredith Hoddenot and Catherine Wells. Noam wrote the music. Efim Shapiro and Christian Ayala did the mixing and sound design. Serena Solon checked the facts. Mandy Nguyen is going for a swim. And Bird Pinkerton, she jumped up and ran to the door while the alarm was blaring. But the door slammed shut, and over the loudspeaker she heard a deep voice.

Special thanks this week to PJ Vazell, Matt Payne, and Robert Johnson for their help. If you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, email us. We're unexplainable at Vox.com. We'd also love it if you wrote us a review or rating. This podcast and all of Vox is free, in part because of gifts from our readers and listeners. You can go to Vox.com slash give to give today.

Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back next week.