World Athletics is literally destroying the beautiful spectacle of track and field with its crazy false start rule. The removal of St Lucia’s Julien Alfred, Bahamas’ TyNia Gather and America’s Devon Allen from their respective events last Sunday (July 16, 2022) was unfortunate on several levels to say the least. That action by the officials cheapened and reduced the women's 100m final and the men's 110mH final. And, it deprived those athletes the opportunity to perform their best on one of the grandest stages of global competition. Who really knows for sure what the outcome would have been had those athletes been allowed to compete.
“Fast start” vs “false start”
I do believe that World Athletics should rethink the false start rule and make an unambiguously clear distinction between a "fast start" and a "false start". Even with the use of aided technology one cannot realistically determine and mandate just how fast an athlete should react to the starter's gun. That's absurd to put it mildly. Irrefutably, athletes hear differently, and they react at different rates based on how fast or slow messages are relayed by motor neurons that stimulate their respective fast twitch muscles. It is therefore unfair to punish an athlete simply because he or she hears and reacts at faster rate than others.
Now, the matter of a "false start" is a horse of a completely different colour. A false start should be deemed to have occurred when an athlete moves before the firing of the starter's gun, in the hope of securing an unfair advantage. And it is only for a false start that an athlete should be ejected from an event.
The position is ironic; World Athletics wants athletes to run very fast, but it doesn't want them to react very fast. In the same way that World Athletics doesn't put any limits on speed it shouldn't put any limits on reaction time.
Henley Taylor
Freelance Sports Writer
Edited by Raymond Byfield
Devon Allen photo courtesy of www.sourceathletics.com
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