In swimming, the difference between winning and losing is often a matter of hundredths, or even thousandths, of a second. Never was this more evident than at the Beijing Summer Olympics in August of 2008, when Michael Phelps won his record-tying seventh gold medal in the 100-yard butterfly by an official margin of 0.01 seconds. His victory was only confirmed after officials scrutinized a video of the race that was slowed down to the ten-thousandth of a second.
With that in mind, the difficulty of the task bestowed upon the judges at last week's NCAA Div. III Swimming and Diving Championships at the University of Tennessee becomes clear. After the effectiveness of the pool's electronic touchpad system was brought into question, the coaches voted to rely solely on human judgment for relay exchanges from Thursday night through Saturday.
The touchpad system, which has become more widely used in collegiate swimming in recent years, is used at NESCAC conference meets solely to overturn disqualifications in question, but it is relied on more heavily at NCAAs.
"They have these little pads that go on top of the starting blocks, and they're connected to the pads in the water," senior David Meyer explained. "It's supposed to be used to judge reaction times for relay starts, and it's based on a pressure sensitive system. ... The swimmer [underwater] will touch the pad, the timer will start and then the timer will stop as soon as it feels no more pressure on top of the blocks."
If the timer registers a positive time, it means the exchange was clean.
One of the first events to go off without use of the pads was the 200-yard freestyle relay final. The Jumbos' 200 free relay team of juniors Owen Rood and E.J. Testa and seniors Meyer and quad-captain Gordy Jenkins placed ninth in the morning preliminaries (1:22.74), clinching the top spot in the consolation final that consisted of the ninth-through 16th-place preliminary finishers. In the final on Thursday evening, Tufts edged out Williams by 0.07 seconds (1:22.67), seemingly earning a victory in the heat, a ninth-place finish good for an All-American honorable mention, and 18 points for the team.
Just moments later, however, the judge responsible for watching the Jumbos' lane declared that the team's final exchange was illegal. Meyer, the judge said, had left the blocks before Testa touched the wall. Both video and photographic evidence of the exchange appear to show Testa's hand touching the wall while Meyer is still on the blocks, and Tufts used this evidence to attempt to file an official appeal.
"You kind of do anything you can in that situation," coach Adam Hoyt said. "As a coach, my job is to support our athletes, so I did everything I could at that meet and tried to represent our school and our athletes to the best of my ability. ... Unfortunately, in our case the appeal wasn't granted."
Under NCAA rules, officials are not permitted to see photo or video evidence in an appeal, and therefore they denied the Jumbos' request. Whether this rule will change in the coming years remains to be seen.
"It's definitely something that's going to have to be addressed in the future, because I don't want it to happen again," Meyer said. "I know they're going to start implementing some sort of camera stuff and maybe some video reviews in the future, but how soon in the future I don't know. A lot of the rules have to be changed in order for that to happen."
Meyer noted that in his time at Tufts, the touchpad system had faltered at several conference meets as well. He also added that there were other technological problems over the course of last week's national meet, including scoreboard blips and failures to record individual relay times. The meet was held for the first time at the University of Tennessee's Allan Jones Aquatic Center, which was built in 2008.
All seven members of the men's team earned All-American honors, and the Jumbos finished the weekend tied for 20th place with 43 total points. Had they been awarded 18 points for placing ninth in the 200 free relay, they would have been bumped up to 18th, matching last year's result.
"This is a great situation that demonstrates the need for the relay takeoff pads to be operating properly at a championship meet, and a need in swimming for video review," Hoyt said. "The bottom line is — and I don't think anyone from the NCAA or any coaches would argue it — that swimming can be made a fair contest. It needs to be fair, and that can be easily done through the right technology."
Still, controversy continues to arise even on the sport's biggest stage. A full year after Phelps' 0.01-second win in Beijing, General Manager Christophe Berthaud of Omega — the company which makes the Olympic pads — stated that Phelps only won because he pushed the pad more forcefully than second-place finisher Milorad Cavic, and that Phelps did not actually touch the wall first.
"There is a big, big difference," Berthaud said at a 2009 press conference, "between touching the pad and pushing the pad."
While there was no Olympic gold medal on the line last week, the stakes were as high as they get in Div. III swimming. And in a sport where one-one thousandth of a second can make all the difference, the reality of imperfection remains.
