Photo: The start of a women's 100 meters sprint at the 2009 World Track and Field Championships. credit: Corbis
Sprinters have to do more than just run fast. They also have to be able to react quickly to the starting gun. The tiniest edge in start times can make the difference between a win and the back of the pack.
Yet, elite women runners may be regularly jumping the gun -- and getting away with it, found a new study, which calls into question the standards that define false starts.
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In Olympic running events, false start detecting technologies cry foul when runners apply a certain amount of pressure to the starting blocks within the first 100 milliseconds (or one one-hundredth of a second) after the firing of the start gun. The basis for that criteria came from a 1990 study of eight Finnish sprinters, all men and none as elite as Olympic athletes.
But when researchers from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, recently analyzed data from hundreds of male and female sprinters who raced in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, they found some potentially race-changing results.
First of all, the team reported in the journal PLoS One, men reacted an average of 23 milliseconds faster to the start gun than women did.
The fastest reaction time among male sprinters was 109 ms, while the fastest female reaction time was 121 ms, with an average of 166 ms for men and 188 for women.
With a threshold of 100 ms, then, current technologies may be missing some actual false starts. And here's why: If a runner's fastest possible reaction time is 160 ms, but he manages to leave the blocks between 100 ms and 160 ms after the gun goes off, he'll get away with taking off before it's officially time to start.
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Women have a bigger advantage. There is more time between the 100 ms threshold and their own reaction times. And a woman's smaller size and lesser muscle strength make her less likely to generate the force necessary to trigger the false-start alarm in such a short time.
The results suggest a need for new false-start standards, argue the researchers, and that shift could alter the order of podium finishers. But it's not just running races that could eventually be upended by the new findings.
Safety may also be at stake. The researchers suggest that cars, too, should alter the sensitivity of their brake pedals, depending on whether a man or woman is driving. At the very least, by raising awareness about the limits to human reaction times, the study might offer just another reason to exercise excess caution on the road.
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