(Picture by Heinz Kluetmeier/SI)
Yesterday, like many of you, I watched this amazing swimming race on TV.
Phelps was seventh at the 50-meter turn.
And at the end he won by just a fingertip.
Somebody said: clip your nails too short and you might settle for silver.
Yes, it was a very narrow victory.
But the Omega touch pads had the last word.
So, today I went to many Web sites and newspapers looking for the explanation.
And it has been very difficult to get the real story.
The post-television story that newspapers and news Web sites were supposed to tell us.
We all wanted to know more. Not about Phelps, but about how it was decided yesterday that he was the winner.
No answers.
Just confusing photos, fussy videos and a lot of blah, blah, blah…
Then I decided to find out the facts by myself and it took me no more than 30 minutes to get what any reporter or editor could have done for the readers.
First, I found pictures of the devices that decide disputes in swimming.
The Omega Starting Block (OSB9) that detects false starts.
And the Omega (OCP) Touch Pads that respond to swimmers’ touch but not water splashes.
Second, I found an excellent expert (not from a big paper) that told me almost everything that I wanted to know.
Hal Habib, a Palm Beach Post Staff Writer says:
Thankfully, officials at FINA, swimming’s world governing body, had a finish-line camera shooting 100 frames per second, which, they said, confirmed the Omega system.
Officially, it was Phelps in 50.58 seconds and Cavic, of Serbia, in 50.59.
After careful analysis, Peter Huerzeler, a member of the board for Omega, the official timekeeper of the Olympics, said the margin of victory was 4.7 millimeters.
Want to know how much that is? It’s not the amount of space occupied by the question mark in the previous sentence.
It’s more like the period at the end of this one.
It’s 0.18503937007874016 inches.
Give or take, you understand.
Oh, and there’s more.
The touch pad that the swimmers must hit for their times to be registered requires 1.5 kilograms of pressure (about 3.3 pounds) on a 2-millimeter area, Huerzeler said.
You get the idea.
Yes, Hal, I got the idea.
Great job!
Your words were so graphic that I didn’t need too much else.
Next, I went looking for the best photo-finish images. Only the Sports Illustrated frame-by-frame slideshow was worth my time because the rest were very, very confusing.
Like this one from AFP:
Or this one from Getty:
Or this sequence from AP:
Finally, I was expecting some great animated graphics, but I didn’t find any.
So, I went here to see how AS, the Spanish sports daily newspaper explained Phelps’ swimming secrets a few days ago.
And I also found these excellent, but old, graphics from elmundo.es
Well, it’s Saturday.
Print and Web media again have lost a magnificent opportunity to do “post-television journalism.”