Garry Hill writes in response to Roger Ruth:
<<the "luxury of publishing monthly" has nothing to do with it: it's the
rule of caveat emptor that applies here, in the sense that anybody
who relies on the "news media" for precise track & field information
is only setting himself up for huge disappointment. To reallys stretch
the analogy,you wouldn't attempt open-heart surgery after reading
an account in your local rag would you? Then don't trust them to
handle properly something as arcane as the metric system.>>
At some peril, I think I'm going to jump into this. I guess what I'm
looking for in clarification is a completion to this sentence: Garry,
who advises not relying on the "news media" for info, suggests that
Roger instead...
rely on.....
wait for....
obtain the info from....
I say this as somebody who did the first draft of the women's pole
vault and high jump annual performances for one of the FAST
annuals a couple of years ago. Notwithstanding a Track
Newsletter subscription, and sometime marks from the Internet
site of whoever hosted the meet, there were occasions where
things were unclear and one wanted to know who to phone. I
recall an example from a meet somewhere in Idaho, I think it was,
where an initial source or sources showed an NCAA collegian with
an imperial value which was an in-between unlisted imperial value
in the TFN Little Red Book. Websites of the colleges of athletes
sometimes added confusion rather than subtracting it, yielding--in
rare cases--contradictions with Bob Podkaminer's qualifying marks
that seemed to be of a metric vs. imperial nature. Then there was
one obscure high school meet with a mark I only chanced across,
and Ed Grant or somebody in New Jersey made some phone calls
to clarify a related discrepancy. It turned out that there had been
a double conversion, imperial to metric and back or vice versa,
throwing the correct number off by a quarter-inch or centimeter.
In Dragila WR cases, there are alternative sources on which to
rely, at least eventually (e.g., Track Newsletter). But in the
obscure cases, I found the "news media" sometimes constituted
the only source. Except that in the high jump, they would do
things like reporting a high school 5-0 or 5-1 as 5-10. Or a rookie
helper at the meet would do it for them. I'd send a postcard to the
coach, and she'd respond, "Boy, I wish!!"
That was then. This is now. Websites are much improved. Also,
a resource that probably could use more participation by those
interested in such matters is the t-and-f_statistics list (messages
archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/t-and-f_statistics).
Chris Kuykendall
Austin, Texas
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
