FLO-JO AND THE LEGEND OF THE 10.49
The story so far: At the US final Olympic tryouts at Indianapolis in 1988 Florence Griffith Joiner lowered the world record for 100m from 10.76 to 10.49. Others in that and the next quarterfinal also turned in superfast times. The wind reading in both races was officially zero, compared with +5.0 in quarterfinal 3. Peter Huertzeler of the Omega crew was quoted by "Track and Field News" as saying he had thoroughly checked the "machinery" and found it was working correctly, but admitted he had never seen two consecutive zero readings before. Flo-Jo herself said she did not believe her 10.49. Bert Nelson in TFN agreed, and so have an increasing number of track statisticians in the ensuing years. Australian physicist Nick Linthorne has produced strong statistical arguments to support all the doubts but the IAAF still recognises the time. NOW READ ON. At the recent New Zealand schools championships there were not two successive zero readings, but five. Out of the 25 100m readings, in fact, over half (14) were zero. True, both days were unusually calm. But not calm enough, because out of 87 readings in all track races there were no others within 0.5 m/s of zero, in either direction. That is, they were always over +0.5, under -0.5, or zero. Twelve months earlier and 1000 km away, using a similar integrated setup and same brands of software, there were also five successive zeros on a day when, as at Indianapolis, winds were gusting over 5 m/s. A possible explanation of all these aberrations is that the anemometers were automatically resetting to zero before the real reading had been registered. Alternatively (or additionally) program errors may be affecting the resetting process. Such errors are the reason why virtually all digital timers are inaccurate in varying degrees, even timing an interval of one second. That would also help explain the following succession of readings at the earlier NZ meet: 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.8, 1.8, 1.8. Statistics of 13,000 wind readings over a period of 50 years suggest that even at NZ's least windy tracks the odds of having five genuine zeros would be over 800 million to 1 against. So any meet referee encountering more than an occasional zero would be wise to disconnect the anemometer and have it operated by an intelligent human. In a recent BBC documentary, researchers into "artificial intelligence" cheerfully admitted that programs can be so complex that no human being can properly understand them or predict how they will behave. (Some would say the same applies to a great deal of reach-me-down software!) And computers, of course, are no more infallible than the people who instruct them. Since it is now obvious that automatic equipment is prone to phony zeros, and that whether or not it is operating as intended is no guarantee of accuracy, the IAAF no longer has any reason not to remove Flo-Jo's 10.49 from the record book. More importantly, the designers of such equipment no longer have any reason to be satisfied with it, and would be well advised to institute reviews just in case somebody's algorithms have succumbed to his biorhythms. - "that horse's ass, P.N. from New Zealand" - M M Rohl
