Tour de France 2017

How could anyone call that finish? I don't understand.

The finish camera records 10,000 frames a second, Kittel won by 0.0003 of a second.

Aka it was a draw

Just watched highlights and that result's bollocks. It's a dead heat. Olympic swimming measures to hundredths, not thousandths of a second because you can't build a swimming pool accurately enough. Lanes get longer and shorter by several millimetres just due to temperature variation. There's no way the road is built, the line is painted, or the gantry is erected with sufficient accuracy to call that. The road is even curving slightly. How can you even decide which line is perpendicular to it with 6mm accuracy? EBH was robbed.

Because ultimately the finish line is an invisible plane defined by the finish line camera, not by the line on the road (which is about 5cm wide anyway) or anything else, and the 10 000 fps time resolution of the camera is sufficient to differentiate. Same for athletics as far as I know. I don't know about swimming, but presumably imaging is more difficult.

Fucking hell when is a draw a draw, just bring back Sagan and let the riders race, so pissed off with these modern riders for not striking in Sagan support, and a big fuck off to sky.....

Amusing interview on the cycling podcast with Kittel's team manager saying he had it all under control and was just making it exciting.

He suggested the gap was 1.2mm.

Have the school holidays started early?

The finish line is mandated to be 4cm wide, painted black on a wider white strip, and the winner is the rider whose front wheel breaks the plane of the leading edge of the black line first. That's what the rules say about who the winner is, no mention of a camera. Unless that camera can be reliably aligned to that plane with mm accuracy making a call that fine just isn't possible. I don't believe the camera can be that accurate, or even that the line is drawn sufficiently straight.

https://twitter.com/Chris_Boardman/status/883427613699690496

BTW, swimming is different. Timing is via a touch sensor. But gold medals have been lost by visibly touching first but not touching hard enough. There's a good paper on the spurious accuracy of sports measurement here... http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0193723516672905

Is there a precedent for joint stage winners before?

Torvill and Dean?

Interesting. But whatever the rules say, clearly the camera is used to determine the winner when it's close, and therefore its scanning plane does then define the finish plane, wherever it is in relation to the painted line. That seems pretty established, surely.

Why don't you believe the camera can scan at 10 000 fps? Revising arithmetic from previous page with that figure gives ability to differentiate winning margin of 2 mm at 70 km/h.

Touchpads are completely different and in swimming/athletics the length of lanes and timing rather than position is more important.

Well yes, but if the winner is declared on being first past the camera, and the rules say it's the first over the line, and today it's perfectly possible that the first past the camera wasn't the first over the line, you have a problem which should surely be resolved by calling dead heat. I find it interesting there is no blown up image of the photo finish, and would like to understand exactly how they made their decision.

I'm also not sure why dead heats are anathema, rather than an interesting curio. Guess they don't suit the image of the sponsor, Tissot or whoever.

Fair point, I wanted to see the full res image too. Ned B made a similar jab at the timing sponsor on the highlights programme.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2017/jul/05/dave-brailsford-team-sky-bumptious-cycling

Possibly. I heard he's at the Tour to try and win the King of the Mountains jersey.

Is the camera perfectly perpendicular to the road? Is the line? Is it even straight, to within that accuracy?

Nope. Should be a tie for tolerance reasons imo

They probably agree it's a draw too. But none of the systems are geared up for it, and their contractual arrangements probably also dictate that there can be only one winner.

@Hovis

They both awaited the verdict while being swarmed by the media. Boasson Hagen ended up being one of the closest runners-up for a stage win in Tour de France history. With all their sophisticated equipment, the race jury said they found that six millimetres had separated the duo. They didn't mention how much margin of error is in their measurement.

I reckon if they'd have called it a draw, there'd have been an outcry and complaints that they needed better technology to tell the winner.

there can be only one

17 KoM points on offer today, versus 70 tomorrow. Anyone with designs on the jersey in Paris will aim to be in the break tomorrow I think.

Bet it generated loads of columns and advertising.