Thu | Sep 17, 2026

Penalising athletes on milliseconds reaction time is unfair

Published:Saturday | April 5, 2025 | 12:06 AM
Clarendon College’s Roland Smith (left) and St George’s College’s Tyreece Foreman run in the heat four of the Class One boys’ 100 metres after four false starts at the ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys and Girls’ Athletics Championships.
Matthew McKoy
Clarendon College’s Roland Smith (left) and St George’s College’s Tyreece Foreman run in the heat four of the Class One boys’ 100 metres after four false starts at the ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys and Girls’ Athletics Championships.

THE EDITOR, Madam:

This is a follow-up to the letter ‘Violation of sprint start limit’, published in The Gleaner on March 31. This letter references an article ‘Sprint Start Regulation in Athletics: A Critical Review’ by Matthieu Milloz, Kevin Hayes and Andrew Harrison, published in Volume 51 of the Sports Medicine Journal in 2020. The article raised several key points, including:

– The validity and reliability of technologies used to detect false starts in athletics are questioned in the literature.

– The current 100 milliseconds (ms) false-start limit is not supported by robust scientific evidence.

– Further research is needed to map the event sequence and motor control during the sprint start and provide support for sprint start regulations in athletics.

There is an intuitive connection between reaction time and completed distance for the 100 metres sprint that provides insight on the impact of the reaction time on the race. It is based on a 10 seconds time for the 100 metres race, inferring that reaction time of 0.1 second (100 ms) corresponds to one metre, at the end of the race when the sprinters are travelling at full speed. On several occasions in the recent 2025 Champs when the sprint start violation rule was applied, the runners were so tightly bunched up at the start of the race that it was not evident to the eye who would be charged with the false start. This indicates collective superior conditioning for the sprint, not individual cheating.

Note that a time difference of the order of 0.01 seconds (10 ms) at the end of the race (corresponding to 0.1 metre or 3.9 inches) requires a photo finish to determine the winner.

The existing sprint start rule rests on the assumption that a sprinter cheats when their reaction time is slightly less than 100 milliseconds, whereas, in reality, they are just trying to do their best. A sprinter – or anybody for that matter – should not be penalised for genuinely trying to do their best, especially after months of hard and dedicated training, for a spurious infraction lasting less than 100 milliseconds.

DR CLEMENT MCCALLA