Numbers Don't Tell the Full Story

One of the allures of track and field is the uniformity of time, distance, and the "playing field."  When conducted according to the rules, a performance can be judged against all other performances.  Thus barrier breaking events, such as Roger Bannister's breaking of the "four minute barrier" in the mile, are accepted as groundbreaking achievements. Or in an individual context, if you run faster than you ever did before for a mile, you have achieved a PR, set a new standard for your own athletic achievement.

There are ambiguities, the human element, in all this as technology advances and new methods of timing and measuring, for example, provide a new set of standards through which those records are determined.  Even attempts to adjust those set under the old standards, such as hand timing, to fit into a close approximation/comparison of how fast one has gone over a given distance.

All this is a preamble to a question we got about how results get reported in the field events.  Here there has always been a division between the "US system" and the metric system.  In the US we've measured and reported results in feet and inches, while the European standard is to use the metric system.  In the non-athletic world, the arguments have raged for years as to what system should be used in food labelling, for example, where the US measurements are ounces and the European measurements in liters.

We're not going to get into those issues because in athletics, the "winner" among the measurement systems has been the metric system.  The rest of the world uses the metric system to report results, and in the US the NCAA and USATF rules call for measurements to be reported in meters.  Because we've used feet and inches for so long, however, those not in the sport are used to seeing their measurements in the US conversion, rather than in meters.

If a high jumper had just broken the seven foot barrier, for example, people in the US could instantly relate to that achievement, whereas if you reported the feat by saying that that athlete cleared 2.1336 meters, you'd get a confused look or shrug of the shoulders.  So this dual reporting continues.  There is no "right" or "wrong," merely familiarity.  But there is also confusion and interpretation in rules governing the accepted measurement of achievements.

A clear example of this practice occurs in road racing and doesn't involve feet, inches, or meters.  According to road race rules fractions of a second are rounded up.  Thus if you run 2:19.0 or 2:18.91, for a marathon you are credited with the same time.  Any fraction of a second is rounded up, so if you've run 2:18:91 to 2:18.99, your result is still recorded as 2:19.  A similar issue comes into play in the measurement of field events.

The standard method has been the tape measure, which will have both feet and meters.  Both distances can be recorded by reading off the tape, but according to the rules one standard is reported and the other listed as a conversion.  Like the road race timing, however, there is a judgement to be made in any conversion.  Whether you do it with a tape measure or with the modern technology of using a laser device that shoots out a laser beam and triangulates the distance measurement using the bouncing of the beam off of the measuring tools used with the laser, the result is not always clear.

The laser measuring device is programed to report the result in meters, and it can also mathematically convert that measurement to feet and inches.  If you look on a tape measure, you can see that the distances do not always align perfectly, so if you are recording the distance of the throw that way, a judgment has to be made of rounding up or down similar to the road race timing .  Or, if you merely record the distance in meters and convert it later using a conversion tool, similar to that you can find on the Internet, it will give you a distance in feet and inches.

What you will discover using the conversion programs is that, depending on which conversion program you use, you can often get a different measurement in feet and inches for the same metric distance.   In some cases a metric measurement that is shorter in meters comes up longer in feet and inches.  The various governing bodies know this and have training, certification, and a process to hopefully deal with these potential issues.

If you want to dig further into the issue the New England Association of USATF has a page devoted to the topic with many links and photos.  If there is a single "take away" message in all this it is that there is a "human" element in sports statistics that is not always evident.  Sports fans love their statistics and argue over who's the best by using them, but numbers, as always, don't tell the full story.