A misplaced gun shoots down an athlete's chances at a medal

An athlete spends years training for one event. Those precious few seconds in which efforts of a lifetime are squeezed in. Every athlete has one goal, to win. We all compete to win. If winning is not our motive, why compete at all? We spend days, months, years sweating it out and giving it our all, just so we can bring glory to ourselves and our nation. We think that as long as we give it our all, the rest will take care of itself.

However, apart from all our blood and sweat, there are a number of external factors beyond our control that play a significant role in how we perform. Weather, timings of the meet, condition of the track, etc. These things, unfortunately, are not in the athletes’ control.

But all athletes have to live with that. They need to adjust to the inconveniences fostered upon them. What is hard to swallow is when the correct procedure isn’t followed and it leads to you losing out through no fault of your own. In a track event, each millisecond can make a difference. You spend weeks planning out your stay in another city, you travel for days, all just to run one minute which can make or break your athletic record. One important aspect that this article aims to highlight is the fact that the most minute of technical errors can lead to the ultimate demise of an individuals’ dreams.

Below is a case study of the 400 meters heats of the 51^st National Athletics Championship held at Kolkata.

Things too small to make a fuss out of can come back to bite you. Even if you had made a fuss it would have made no difference. What happened here was, the runner in the 5th lane, lost out on qualifications by 0.10 of a second. And if it were not for a irregularity in the positioning of the gunman who signals the start of the race, she may have qualified.

The track was wet, so the gunman was not stationed at his usual spot in front of the runners.

Take a look at the picture below. In the picture taken, the football field’s penalty box gives us a frame of reference for measuring the distance between the gunman and the 2nd runner in the pic.

Things to calculate:

Distance between the gunman and the start point of 5th lane.

Distances known to us:

The breadth of the penalty box= 16.4 meter.

Now what I’ve done is measured the penalty box with pixels. In MS Paint when you draw a line, it shows the pixels.16.4m equals 233 pixels of that image’s resolution

233/16.4=14.207 (conversion factor between pixels and meters)

I’ve drawn another line between the gunman and the runner in the second lane.

It’s 300 pixels between 2nd runner and gun

Applying the conversion factor, there is a 21.1m gap. That is the distance between the second runner and the gunman, using the pixel scale.<

The gunman is the guy on the bottom left of the pic above.

Now here are the start points of the different lanes, eg lane 2 is 7 meters ahead of the 100m line.Lane 2 = 407 MetersLane 3 = 413MLane 4 = 420MLane 5 = 427MLane 6 = 434MLane 7 = 440MLane 8 = 447Mhttp://www.ehow.com/how_6687740_measure-distance-pedometer.html

Now here’s what the info we have looks like.

Distance between gunman and 2nd runner= 21.1m

Start point and 2nd runner= 7 m

Start point and 5th runner= 27m

Gunman———-21.1 m——————– 2nd runner—————————

Start point—- 7 m —-2nd runner

Start point—————————–27m——————5th runner

Distance between Gunman and 5th runner=Distance between gunman and 2nd runner + distance between Start point and 5th runner – start point and 2nd runner= 21.1 + 27 – 7

= 41.7

After it stops raining, the temperature rises because water starts to evaporate. The temperature on 10th September was at least 30 degree celcius at noon.

http://weatherspark.com/averages/33920/9/10/Kolkata-Calcutta-West-Bengal-IndiaNow the temperature has an effect on the speed of sound.

If the temp is 30 degrees celcius the resultant speed of sound is 349.02 m/s.

Now, it’ll take 0.143 seconds for the sound of the gun to travel 50 meters.

http://www.sengpielaudio.com/calculator-speedsound.htm

To travel 41.7 meters, it takes (41.7/349.6503496503497)= 0.119 seconds.

Time difference between the firing of the gunshot and sound reaching lane 5 was 0.119 seconds

The lane 5 runner missed qualification by 0.1 seconds.

If the gunman was positioned in the correct place, ahead of the curve, the results would have been different.https://www.sportskeeda.com/2011/09/11/51st-national-open-athletics-championships-in-kolkata-day-1/You sweat and bleed for your one shot. And its thrown away because of a irregularity you can’t do anything about. Imagine how Bolt must have felt after that false start. At least in his case he knew what went wrong. In this case all the athlete can do is bite the bullet and move on.