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Starting signal technology helped make Noah Lyles' 100-meter gold possible | Fact check

nate trela, usa today
·4 min read

The claim: Speaker start a factor in Noah Lyles' 100 meter dash victory

An Aug. 5 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) speculates about a factor that may have contributed to U.S. runner Noah Lyles’ victory in the 100-meter dash over Jamaica's Kishane Thompson at the Paris Olympics.

“If I did my math right, those starting block speakers made a difference last night,” reads the post, which is a screenshot of a post on X, formerly Twitter. “Without them, Lyles would have been at a disadvantage of 0.008 sec – how long the sound of the pistol takes to travel from lane 4 – Thompson – to lane 7 – Lyles. He won by 0.005.”

The Facebook post was shared more than 2,000 times in four days.

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The speaker start system used in the race eliminated what would have been a disadvantage that may have cost Lyles gold. The Olympics moved away from using a starter’s pistol to begin races because runners closer to the starter had an advantage by hearing the shot sooner than those further away. Because of their different starting positions, the amount of time it would have taken Lyles to hear a starter's pistol compared to the second-place finisher would have been more than the margin of victory.

Starting system changed to eliminate lane position advantage

On Aug. 4, Lyles won the 100-meter dash by 0.005 seconds, with a system of super-fast cameras and timing technology used to determine his torso reached the finish line before silver medalist Thompson.

Training and athleticism were the most important components of the victory, but a change in how runners are signaled to start sprinting eliminated a disadvantage athletes starting to the outside of the track historically faced.

Until 2012, Olympic runners were typically signaled to start the race by the firing of a pistol into the air. The runners closest to the person firing the pistol hear the shot a fraction of a second sooner than those further away and thus have a slight advantage in the race, according to a 2008 study published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. The opposite is true for those further away.

Omega, which has been the official timekeeper at most Olympics for more than a century, has worked for years to refine the starting signal to eliminate the disadvantage that came from being farther away from a starter firing a pistol in the air. At the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, it began using its current configuration of an electronic starting pistol paired with redesigned starting blocks (as seen in the Facebook post) that placed individual speakers the same distance behind each runner. The signal is played simultaneously to avoid any athlete getting an advantage, according to Omega spokesperson Ilana Taub. The change was actually most important in the 200-meter and 400-meter races, where runners’ starting positions are staggered to account for the curves in the 400-meter oval track, Taub said.

Lyles, starting in the seventh lane, likely would not have heard the signal to start soon enough to have won under the old system (all other factors being equal), experts told USA TODAY.

A straightforward calculation shows how the change came into play for the sprinter.

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Track lanes on the Olympic track are 1.22 meters wide, according to NBC’s guide to Olympic track rules and regulations. That put Lyles, in lane 7, 3.66 meters to the right of Thompson in lane 4, who would have been closer to the starter.

Henrik von Coler, an assistant professor in the School of Music at Georgia Tech with an engineering background, said that based on sound traveling at sea level at 343 meters per second, Lyles would have gotten the signal to start about 0.01 seconds later than Thompson if a starter had fired a traditional pistol into the air.

Taub, who offered a similar calculation, and von Coler both noted that elevation, humidity, barometric pressure and temperature affect the speed of sound, but none of those variables would have made the gap less than Lyles’s 0.005-second margin of victory. Both said the 0.008-second lag in the social media post was plausible under certain conditions.

USA TODAY reached out to the Facebook user who shared the claim for comment.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Use of starting pistol would have cost Noah Lyles gold | Fact check