Conway writes:
>And as of yet no one has shown where changing
>the false start rule will benefit the athlete .. And the only benefit being
>tossed about for the fan is a cut down in time ... And when that is
>mentioned it is said as if there is soooooo much time being lost at track
>meets due to false starts ... Can anyone give me a realistic time savings
>to
>a meet based on excessive false starts .. A real (has been messured)
>quantitative value ??? One that would neccesitate that SOMETHING BE DONE so
>that we don't keep dragging these meets on like this .
Funny you should ask. Because you don't have to look any farther than last
week's Indoor World Champs in Lisbon to find an example of how false starts
can make a mess of a meet.
List memeber Bob Hersh was at the meet Lisbon of course, and he sent me this
account yesterday. I post it to the entire list with his permission:
Message text written by "Kurt Bray"
>Right, and I think you will agree that an overly-long meet running behind
>schedule and riddled with false starts is a low quality product. <
You should have been in Lisbon. The false starts were deadly. The meet ran
as much as a half hour behind at one point and there was nothing we could do
about it. Interestingly enough, in the men's 60, in the final alone there
were three false starts charged to I think four different runners (one of
whom was DQ'ed) before they got a clean one. Harden and Montgomery, the two
NCAA-trained sprinters, sat patiently in their blocks, were not charged with
any false starts, and while everyone else was playing these games, they just
did what they were supposed to do. They might have won the gold and silver
anyway, but I had the impression that their abstention from the
beat-the-gun-if-you-can business gave them a mental edge when it mattered.
Bob H
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
