WHEN Olympic sprinters dash down the track in Beijing this August, the fastest athlete may not always take home the gold medal. That is because the design of the start-gun system gives athletes on the inside lanes, who are nearer to the gun, an unfair advantage straight off the blocks. They react more quickly because the tone is louder and they hear it sooner than runners who are further away. Though officials are aware of the problem, they have no plans to correct it before the Olympic games this summer.
鈥淎thletes closer to the start gun not only hear the bang earlier but the loudness shocks them into a faster start鈥�
Athletics officials have known for years that the bang from the start gun reaches the ears of runners in the outside lanes later than those in the inside lanes. The difference is especially big in races such as the 400-metres sprint, where the starting positions are staggered. To correct for this unfairness many major athletics events, including the Olympics, broadcast a start tone through loudspeakers set just behind each runner鈥檚 blocks, so everyone should hear the signal at exactly the same time. At most major meets the starter鈥檚 gun is silent, serving only to trigger the speakers. The Olympics, however, still use a 鈥渓oud gun鈥�.
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If a traditional start gun is also used, the speaker system does not help. At both the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and the 2004 Athens games, runners in the outside lanes of staggered-start races were slower out of the blocks than runners on inner lanes. In fact, each lane鈥檚 start delay was exactly what you would predict if the runners were responding solely to the loud gun, says Jesus Dapena at Indiana University in Bloomington, who began studying the problem three years ago. For these races, runners in lane 8 got off the mark an average of about 150 milliseconds after runners in lane 1, Dapena found. A time delay of that magnitude translates into about a metre鈥檚 difference at the finish line, easily the difference between silver and gold.
The loudness of the gun is a second problem. David Collins at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada and his colleagues found that both trained sprinters and untrained volunteers burst out of the starting blocks about 18 milliseconds more quickly in response to start signals of 120 decibels than to signals of 80 decibels. The louder sound was also more likely to provoke a startle response, which increased reaction time by a further 18 milliseconds, they found (Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, ). The effect should give a further edge to runners in the inside lanes, especially as standard start guns fire at up to 180 decibels.
Olympic officials are aware that runners in outside lanes get slower starts, says Imre Matrahazi, technical manager for the International Association of Athletics Federations in Monaco, the international body that oversees athletics. The IAAF is developing new standards that will correct the problem, but it sees no need to make emergency changes before the Beijing Olympics. Indeed, Peter Huerzeler, who recently retired as head of athletics timing for Swiss Timing, the consortium of companies that handles starts and timing for the Olympics, blames the runners for their slow starts. 鈥淭hey are not listening to the signal from the starting blocks,鈥� he says.