Given that athletics races can be won or lost by a margin as small as a hundredth of a second, do athletes risk a gold medal by wearing gold chains?
鈥� Horse racing has always understood the relationship between a jockey鈥檚 weight and the power output that a horse can sustain. This is why jockeys are weighed together with their saddle, boots and gold chains, if any, before each race. Lead weights may be added to the saddles (known as a handicap) to ensure that no horse and rider have an unfair advantage.
A human sprinter trains to maximise power output and uses this to accelerate body weight from rest up to a peak velocity, maintaining this to the finish. For a fixed power output, the rate of acceleration goes down as weight rises. So gold chains will mean a slower acceleration.
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A 100-metre sprinter accelerates for almost two-thirds of the race. Olympic champion Usain Bolt achieves an amazing velocity of more than 43 kilometres an hour.
As your questioner points out, the winning margin in a race can be as little as 0.01 seconds. That amounts to 0.1 per cent of the men鈥檚 100 metres world record, which is 9.58 seconds. If a sprinter weighs 93 kilograms and their gold chain 50 grams, then the chain represents 0.05 per cent of their weight. Reducing a sprinter鈥檚 weight while maintaining the same power output would be beneficial, it seems.
If the finalists all wore chains 鈥� and most appear to 鈥� then no one would have an unfair advantage. But it would be helpful to wear a gold-plated aluminium chain, saving a solid gold one for the podium (assuming the runner is among the medallists). Tennis players do something similar when they don expensive watches for the presentation.
Boxers can get a little lighter by spitting into a bucket if they have difficulty meeting their class weight. A sprinter wanting to wear a 50-gram chain without being disadvantaged could easily spit 50 millilitres into a bucket just before the race.
However, don鈥檛 discount the inspirational value of the medallion hanging from a sprinter鈥檚 neck. Looking at close-ups of sprinters鈥� faces crossing the finish line in record-breaking times, one could be forgiven for thinking that the result would be no different even if they wore three chains!
鈥淥lympic champion Usain Bolt achieves an amazing velocity of more than 43 kilometres an hour鈥�
Andrew Carruthers, Beaconsfield, Quebec, Canada
鈥� The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) uses a somewhat quaint rule 鈥� the winner of a race is judged to be the athlete who gets his or her torso across the line first. Heads, hands and feet do not count.
The finish is recorded using a camera that takes at least 1000 pictures a second specifically of the line, and nothing but the line. Officials use these to judge which torso belongs to which runner, and to determine how long each athlete took to run from the start to the finish line in thousandths of a second (or hundredths in the days when equipment didn鈥檛 have the necessary precision).
The results are almost instantly flashed up on the scoreboard in the stadium, and within fractions of a second can be relayed to the millions of people watching the race live on TV.
Obviously no official would make a judgement based on jewellery dangling from an athlete鈥檚 neck, because it isn鈥檛 part of the torso. But might a gold chain worn within the athlete鈥檚 vest cause the vest to arrive a scant fraction of a second earlier than it would otherwise have?
Consider an athlete who can run 100 metres in 10 seconds. On average, they would be covering 10 metres in one second, 1 metre in a tenth of a second, 10 centimetres in a hundredth of a second, and 1 centimetre in a thousandth of a second.
From a standing start, they must be crossing the finish line at a speed slightly faster than the whole-race average, we can assume. So in that final thousandth of a second, they are perhaps travelling a distance of 1.5 centimetres. Wearing a gold chain this thick would be a crippling handicap.
Phil Walker, Gloucester, UK
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