When do olympic lanes end

In meter dashes, he found that the average time for athletes in lane 8 was approximately 0. This suggests that there may be some truth to the belief that sharper turns cause runners to slow down—and that disadvantage seems to outweigh the disadvantage of not being able to see your competitors, at least for this distance.

And lastly, in the meter dash, runners in the innermost lanes finished the fastest. It depends on the individual athlete, too. Runners who are especially skilled at navigating curves might feel like they have an edge on the inside, while others who concentrate better without seeing their competitors may prefer an outside spot.

James and Merritt had the advantage of chasing van Niekerk while the South African had to run within himself. But van Niekerk flew during the second , running an absurd 9. James and Merritt were clear of the runners they were staggered behind, but they couldn't catch up to van Niekerk, who had gone out in about They would begin to reel him in around the turn, however. At meters to go, with the stagger finally even, James and Merritt had nearly pulled even with van Niekerk -- but it was the closest they would get.

Van Niekerk powered away down the stretch, never trailing for any moment and running to a shocking world record. While van Niekerk wasn't thrilled to be in lane 8, there were some advantages, too. First, he ran his race without a worry of anyone else's.

He wasn't chasing anyone; he was simply running as hard as he could. Second, wider turns make for faster running.

Van Niekerk had less time on the first turn because he started nearly halfway into it, and he had a more gradual turn to run around while the athletes on the inside lanes had a tighter turn to manage. Lane 8 might not turn into the premiere lane, but van Niekerk's run should make it more desirable. Starting in lanes makes a big difference for the athletes -- chaos would reign if lanes weren't assigned.

The is the longest event in which runners stay in the same lane for the entire race, but meter races usually have a one turn stagger, meaning they'll run the first turn of the race in a lane before cutting into lane 1 on the back stretch. At the recent U. Olympic Trials, the had a waterfall start, meaning all the athletes would start on the same line, but could cut in as soon as the gun went off. It wasn't necessarily fair. The rationale behind slow outside lanes has to do with the staggered starts required to make sure each racer runs the same distance.

Due to this staggering, runners in the outside lanes cannot see their competitors for the majority of the race. In most races, the fastest runners are assigned to the middle lanes in accordance with the competition rules. Not surprisingly, the fastest runners — who are in the middle lanes — often win. Are these racers winning because those lanes are the fastest or because those runners tend to be the fastest?

Similar to the idea behind clinical trials for a drug, the ideal way to test lane advantages would be to randomly assign runners to lanes and see how they do on average.

Thankfully, there is a subset of race data that does this: Typically, runners are randomly assigned to lanes in the first heats of events. By using data only from first heats of elite track and field events, I was able eliminate the bias from faster runners being assigned to certain lanes.

For the — which is run on a straightaway — I found no evidence of lane advantages. I found that it is in fact outside lanes that are associated with faster race times — on average lane eight is roughly 0. This is sizable for a race in which the world record is Faster outside lanes make sense biomechanically as tighter corners produce slower race times.

But the result seems to disprove the idea that not seeing competitors can slow a runner down. In the , I found no evidence that middle lanes are fastest.

All lanes seem to be roughly equal. It is worth noting that there is more variability in meter times, so it is harder to detect small effects, if they exist. But even this nondifference between lanes in the is striking.