EDITORIAL: Silly rule mars a great track meet

Published 1:00 pm Friday, July 22, 2022

Imagine a football rule that penalized a player for reacting so quickly that he runs past a defender for an easy touchdown catch.

Or a baseball player who anticipates the pitcher’s move to the plate and steals home but instead of scoring the winning run he’s thrown out of the game.

Probably you can’t envision such scenarios because they’re too ludicrous to contemplate.

But you’re not in charge of the rules for track and field.

The people who are in charge, unfortunately, insist that in a sport where speed is such a vital skill, being a trifle too fast is grounds not for a gold medal, but for disqualification.

This mystifying rule was enforced on July 17 on the sport’s biggest stage outside the Olympic Games. Sadly, this dismal display happened at Hayward Field on the University of Oregon campus, where the World Athletics Championships are taking place in America for the first time. This event, which draws a worldwide television audience measured in the hundreds of millions, is a showcase for Oregon.

The 10-day event, which concludes July 24, also has the potential to raise interest among Americans in the sport prior to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. But thanks to the farcical rule that afflicted Devon Allen, one of the fastest hurdlers in the world and a former University of Oregon track athlete and football player, the event, at least briefly, devolved from a celebration into an embarrassment.

Here’s what happened.

When the starter’s pistol went off for the 110-meter hurdles, an event in which Allen has run the third-fastest time ever, he got a great start out of the blocks.

Too great, it turned out.

Allen was disqualified for what’s technically called a false start. But that term, in this case, is as inappropriate as the rule itself.

Allen didn’t start running too early, before the pistol was fired, which is what any logical person would define as a false start.

He reacted too quickly. You might ask, and quite reasonably, how, in a race that takes about 13 seconds, reacting too quickly could be anything but a benefit.

The answer is that track and field officials set one-tenth of a second as the typical reaction time — the time between the pistol’s blast and the runner’s foot leaving the block. If a runner reacts any quicker, he or she is disqualified. Allen’s reaction time on July 17 was 0.099. That’s one-thousandth of a second too fast, a margin only a machine can measure. And only a human could decide is a reason to disqualify a runner.

To reiterate: Allen didn’t cheat. He didn’t start running before the starter’s pistol went off. In effect, he was ready to run a tiny fraction of a second faster than his competitors.

It is difficult to conceive of a more nonsensical rule, or one that’s more antithetical to the concept of competition.

Scientists once concluded that a human couldn’t run a mile in less than four minutes. But when Roger Bannister accomplished that feat in 1954, he wasn’t disqualified from the race. He was celebrated for his landmark athletic achievement.

This, of course, is how we normally respond to athletes who hone their abilities and transcend what we believed to be possible. Normal, sadly, is a word that can’t be fairly applied to track and field’s reaction time rule.