Study: Starter's Pistol Favors Nearest Lanes

With the Beijing Olympics only a month away, an article in the journal Nature discusses the (claimed) effect of the starter's pistol giving an advantage to runners in the lanes nearest to the starter.

The Olympics may not be the bastion of pure sporting contest that people might think. Although the pistol used to start sprint events in the Games might make good theatre, it may mean that sprinters in lane 1, nearest the gun, get away from the blocks faster.

Most international athletics competitions use speakers behind each athlete to broadcast the start signal. The Olympics uses this system but also increases the drama of the set-piece by having a starting official, complete with pistol.

But when David Collins and colleagues at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, reviewed reaction-time data for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, they saw a marked effect: runners in lane 1 had an average reaction time of 160 milliseconds, whereas those in lane 2 got away in 171 milliseconds. Sprinters in lane 7 (bizarrely the lane with the slowest average reaction time of the eight lanes) took 185 milliseconds to get off the blocks.

Collins also did some experiments of his own, to attempt to see whether the effect is real. He set off trained and untrained sprinters with a range of gun sounds, each with a different intensity. The research is published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. [footnotes omitted]

Obviously, any differences in reaction times due to increased sound impulse will likely have the greatest effect on the shorter distance races such as the 100m sprint, where a couple of hundredths of a second might make a difference in the outcome.