I was wondering too! Three way Silver medal tie? - Granite Grok

I was wondering too! Three way Silver medal tie?

Olympics Rio 3 way Silver Medal tie 100m butterfly Michael PhelpsI was watching the Olympics when in Michael Phelps’ last individual event of this Olympics (the 100M butterfly), there was a three way tie for second at 51.14.  At the time, I thought that odd – certainly timing equipment can easily get down to thousandths of a second, right?  And then Regressing talked about that and why it isn’t the timing equipment or calibration – it’s the pool (reformatted, emphasis mine):

…Modern timing systems are capable of measuring down to the millionth of a second—so why doesn’t FINA, the world swimming governing body, increase its timing precision by adding thousandths-of-seconds? As it turns out, FINA used to. In 1972, Sweden’s Gunnar Larsson beat American Tim McKee in the 400m individual medley by 0.002 seconds. That finish led the governing body to eliminate timing by a significant digit. But why?

In a 50 meter Olympic pool, at the current men’s world record 50m pace, a thousandth-of-a-second constitutes 2.39 millimeters of travel. FINA pool dimension regulations allow a tolerance of 3 centimeters in each lane, more than ten times that amount. Could you time swimmers to a thousandth-of-a-second? Sure, but you couldn’t guarantee the winning swimmer didn’t have a thousandth-of-a-second-shorter course to swim. (Attempting to construct a concrete pool to any tighter a tolerance is nearly impossible; the effective length of a pool can change depending on the ambient temperature, the water temperature, and even whether or not there are people in the pool itself.)

And USA Today answers the question – first time for a three way tie?

To answer the question many of you have: No, Michael Phelps finishing second with two other swimmers in Rio’s 100m butterfly finals Friday night isn’t the first three-way tie in swimming.

It was just over a year ago that the 200m breaststroke finals at the world championships in Russia ended with three swimmers earning bronze models.

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