I certainly understand the need for exactitude with respect to competitive courses. But (puts on statistician hat) there’s variance in everything, no matter what lengths one goes to avoid it. So just what are the official tolerances regarding the lengths of competitive pools? A tenth of an inch? A hundredth of an inch? This inquiring mind wants to know what levels of exactitude hold in pool-making for this level of competition - which, I’ll note, is high school, and not the Olympics.
One-half inch doesn’t sound like much to me, and proportionally, it’s pretty small too: it’s less than 1/1968 of the standard 25-meter length of the pool. In a sport such as horse racing, your starting position can probably add that much to your trip; 1/1968 of the Kentucky Derby distance is 3 feet, 4 inches, and a horse starting from the outside probably does have to run that much further than a horse starting from the rail. So it would seem to me to be the sort of margin of error that would be within competitive tolerances for lower levels of competition, at least. But I’m ignorant of the standards of this particular sport, so I could be wrong. So help me out here, guys.
OK, as I understand it, international swimming competitions come under the purview of FINA (“La Federation Internationale de Natation”). On their website, they have the rules for facilities that are to be used for FINA-sanctioned competitions. On this page, http://www.fina.org/facilityrules_2.html, it says
If I’m reading that right, it’s saying that a regulation pool must measure between 25.00 meters and 25.03 meters, i.e., a little long is OK, but a pool can’t be shorter than 25 meters.
Of course, the rules for facilities sanctioned by the Virginia state championship may be different than those used by FINA.
Ah, so the variance wasn’t the problem (as it’s OK for the pool to be over an inch longer than 25 meters); it was that the acceptable interval as a whole runs long.
I’ll bet that the key problem with the pool in question was that the length did not account for installed touch panels.
Note that the rule quoted above states that “Tolerances cannot be exceeded when touch panels are installed.”
The touch panels used in my high school swimming competitions were about 1-2 inches thick. If the pool in question was between 25.00 and 25.03 meters long without a touch panel, the subsequent installation of a touch panel may have sufficed to bring the length to less than 25.00 meters.
(A touch panel, for those who may be wondering, is an electronic pad at the end of the lane that stops the timer when hit by a swimmer’s hand. It is used to determine swimmers’ times, and thus, the winner of the race.)