--:-- Host: As you've probably heard by now, we've teamed up with BetMGM this season. We'll be using BetMGM lines to make all of our picks, and we'll have special offers for our listeners each week. If you haven't signed up for BetMGM yet, use bonus code THEATHLETIC, and you'll get a one-year subscription to The Athletic, plus up to a $1,500 first bet offer on your first wager with BetMGM. Here's how it works. Download the BetMGM app and sign up using bonus code THEATHLETIC. Make your first deposit of at least $10, place your first bet on any game, and claim your voucher for a one-year subscription to The Athletic. For new customers only in partnership with Kansas Crossing Casino and Hotel. Don't forget, if you haven't signed up for BetMGM yet, use bonus code THEATHLETIC and you'll get a one-year subscription to The Athletic plus up to a $1,500 first bet offer on your first wager.
--:-- [Sound clip of a bustling market]
--:-- Host: Save up to 30% on fall meal essentials during the Spice Up Fall event. Now at Whole Foods Market with sales on organic honeycrisp apples and winter squash. Grab fresh and mild swordfish steaks for a cozy pan-seared main. Or make a hearty stew starring no antibiotics ever short ribs. For something sweet, indulge in limited-time pumpkin spice treats from the bakery and find even more in the aisles. Spice up fall and save at Whole Foods Market, in-store and online.
--:-- [Sound clip transitions to a more serious tone]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: If you're a Chicago business looking to give back locally, Gardeneers is your kind of nonprofit. We work in under-resourced schools across the South and West sides, helping students grow fresh food and learn about health, sustainability, and equity. Your corporate sponsorship supports hands-on education, youth mentorship, and the transformation of school gardens into vibrant green spaces. Learn more about sponsorship opportunities at Gardeneers.org and let's grow something together.
--:-- [Sound clip of a track meet]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: And what we have for you today is an episode from one of our kindred spirits over at Vox. This is an episode of a show called Unexplainable, in which they use science multiple times a week to tell a story, to explain something. And this episode just happens to be a sports episode. It happens to be about an object I've long been fascinated by. And that object happens to be a gun.
--:-- [Sound clip of a sprinter]
--:-- Tynia Gaither: 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 wouldn't choose any other career for myself right now.
--:-- [Sound clip of a track meet]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: Back in July, Tynia 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. Tynia 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.
--:-- [Sound clip of a crowd cheering]
--:-- Tynia Gaither: 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.
--:-- [Sound clip of a starting gun]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: Tynia Gaither of the Bahamas. She lined up in the second lane. Twice a world championship finalist over 200. And Tynia was locked in. If you go back and watch the video, you can just see how tense my face looks. I'm like, okay, yeah, this is going to be great.
--:-- [Sound clip of a sprinter's ritual]
--:-- Tynia Gaither: She made sure to do her pre-race ritual. My teammates like to laugh at me about that. 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. And then I get into the blocks.
--:-- [Sound clip of a starting gun]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: She's set 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.
--:-- [Sound clip of confusion]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: At this point, it was all confusion. That second gun was officials stopping the race because someone had broken a rule. Can't see from this angle. 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. Yeah, it's coming up on our screen.
--:-- [Sound clip of a false start announcement]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: A false start means that Tynia 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.
--:-- [Sound clip of a crowd protesting]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: After a false start, all the runners have to line up again and restart. But without Tynia 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.
--:-- [Sound clip of a protest]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: Okay, so this might take a little while. Tynia 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 much. 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.
--:-- [Sound clip of a reaction time analysis]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: Pressure sensors in the starting blocks showed that Tynia 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. Tynia was officially disqualified for reacting seven thousandths of a second quicker than the legal limit.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist explaining]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: 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, Tynia must have started before the gun went off, even if no one could see it. They were basically telling Tynia, you didn't wait for the gun to go off before you started. You cheated. You guessed.
--:-- [Sound clip of a coach's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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.
--:-- [Sound clip of other athletes' disqualifications]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: Tynia 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.
--:-- [Sound clip of a historian's perspective]
--:-- P.J. Wiesel: 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.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: I'm Noah Masenfeld, and this week on Unexplainable, how fast can humans react? And is a rule like this actually fair?
--:-- [Sound clip of a conversation between Noah and Brian]
--:-- Brian Resnick: 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?
--:-- Mathieu Milose: 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 athlete to have an unfair advantage by anticipating the gun.
--:-- [Sound clip of a detailed scientific explanation]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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 the time. Like you actually exerting force on the starting blocks that would detect your movement. So there is all these different components. It's complex.
--:-- [Sound clip of a historian's perspective]
--:-- P.J. Wiesel: 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 P.J. 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.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: The 100 millisecond false start threshold is not science-based. He argues that this tenth of a second limit is just not based in rigorous science.
--:-- [Sound clip of a detailed scientific explanation]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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, like, back-of-the-napkin calculations, you know, that whole list of things that I outlined that need to happen before you could start a race. Some say that could take 85 milliseconds. So 15 milliseconds faster than what is allowed.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: But then again, Mathieu, he was very insistent on this. 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 sprints that I think it's worth to try to improve this.
--:-- [Sound clip of a detailed scientific explanation]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: Mechu basically thinks that improving on this number and getting a better estimate of what the limit could be will really make races fair. 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. He really wants to take the fastest elite athletes and bring them into the lab. So not using amateurs anymore. Yeah, not using amateurs. Top-level sprinters react quicker than you and me.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: 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. They prefer to delay their response time to not be disqualified.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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 the limit is.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: 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 fast. So that's like a huge difference. Yeah. Maybe that's where we should decide where the race starts.
--:-- [Sound clip of a detailed scientific explanation]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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, like, back-of-the-napkin calculations, you know, that whole list of things that I outlined that need to happen before you could start a race. Some say that could take 85 milliseconds. So 15 milliseconds faster than what is allowed. But then again, Mathieu, he was very insistent on this. 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 sprints that I think it's worth to try to improve this.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: Mechu basically thinks that improving on this number and getting a better estimate of what the limit could be will really make races fair. 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. He really wants to take the fastest elite athletes and bring them into the lab. So not using amateurs anymore. Yeah, not using amateurs. Top-level sprinters react quicker than you and me.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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. They prefer to delay their response time to not be disqualified.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: 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 the limit is.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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 fast. So that's like a huge difference. Yeah. Maybe that's where we should decide where the race starts.
--:-- [Sound clip of a detailed scientific explanation]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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, like, back-of-the-napkin calculations, you know, that whole list of things that I outlined that need to happen before you could start a race. Some say that could take 85 milliseconds. So 15 milliseconds faster than what is allowed. But then again, Mathieu, he was very insistent on this. 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 sprints that I think it's worth to try to improve this.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: Mechu basically thinks that improving on this number and getting a better estimate of what the limit could be will really make races fair. 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. He really wants to take the fastest elite athletes and bring them into the lab. So not using amateurs anymore. Yeah, not using amateurs. Top-level sprinters react quicker than you and me.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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. They prefer to delay their response time to not be disqualified.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: 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 the limit is.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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 fast. So that's like a huge difference. Yeah. Maybe that's where we should decide where the race starts.
--:-- [Sound clip of a detailed scientific explanation]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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, like, back-of-the-napkin calculations, you know, that whole list of things that I outlined that need to happen before you could start a race. Some say that could take 85 milliseconds. So 15 milliseconds faster than what is allowed. But then again, Mathieu, he was very insistent on this. 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 sprints that I think it's worth to try to improve this.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: Mechu basically thinks that improving on this number and getting a better estimate of what the limit could be will really make races fair. 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. He really wants to take the fastest elite athletes and bring them into the lab. So not using amateurs anymore. Yeah, not using amateurs. Top-level sprinters react quicker than you and me.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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. They prefer to delay their response time to not be disqualified.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: 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 the limit is.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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 fast. So that's like a huge difference. Yeah. Maybe that's where we should decide where the race starts.
--:-- [Sound clip of a detailed scientific explanation]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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, like, back-of-the-napkin calculations, you know, that whole list of things that I outlined that need to happen before you could start a race. Some say that could take 85 milliseconds. So 15 milliseconds faster than what is allowed. But then again, Mathieu, he was very insistent on this. 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 sprints that I think it's worth to try to improve this.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: Mechu basically thinks that improving on this number and getting a better estimate of what the limit could be will really make races fair. 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. He really wants to take the fastest elite athletes and bring them into the lab. So not using amateurs anymore. Yeah, not using amateurs. Top-level sprinters react quicker than you and me.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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. They prefer to delay their response time to not be disqualified.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: 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 the limit is.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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 fast. So that's like a huge difference. Yeah. Maybe that's where we should decide where the race starts.
--:-- [Sound clip of a detailed scientific explanation]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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, like, back-of-the-napkin calculations, you know, that whole list of things that I outlined that need to happen before you could start a race. Some say that could take 85 milliseconds. So 15 milliseconds faster than what is allowed. But then again, Mathieu, he was very insistent on this. 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 sprints that I think it's worth to try to improve this.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: Mechu basically thinks that improving on this number and getting a better estimate of what the limit could be will really make races fair. 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. He really wants to take the fastest elite athletes and bring them into the lab. So not using amateurs anymore. Yeah, not using amateurs. Top-level sprinters react quicker than you and me.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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. They prefer to delay their response time to not be disqualified.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: 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 the limit is.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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 fast. So that's like a huge difference. Yeah. Maybe that's where we should decide where the race starts.
--:-- [Sound clip of a detailed scientific explanation]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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, like, back-of-the-napkin calculations, you know, that whole list of things that I outlined that need to happen before you could start a race. Some say that could take 85 milliseconds. So 15 milliseconds faster than what is allowed. But then again, Mathieu, he was very insistent on this. 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 sprints that I think it's worth to try to improve this.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Mathieu Milose: Mechu basically thinks that improving on this number and getting a better estimate of what the limit could be will really make races fair. 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. He really wants to take the fastest elite athletes and bring them into the lab. So not using amateurs anymore. Yeah, not using amateurs. Top-level sprinters react quicker than you and me.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
--:-- Noah Masenfeld: 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. They prefer to delay their response time to not be disqualified.
--:-- [Sound clip of a scientist's perspective]
