Why there are so many ties in swimming 🏊‍♀️ 🏊‍♀️

This is just a public service announcement to say that these are not milliseconds This time is not 17 seconds and 29 milliseconds as many people might refer to it It's actually 17 seconds and 290 milliseconds since there are a thousand milliseconds in a second You could also say 17 seconds and 29 senti seconds or 29 hundreds of a second In sports like swimming, times are not recorded down to the millisecond place Even though we have the technology to do so The reason is that even when pools are built to strict standards Tiny differences in lane lengths can be larger than the distance a swimmer travels in a single millisecond A fast swimmer might move at two meters per second At that speed a one centimeter difference in lane lengths creates about a five millisecond difference in finishing time So measuring milliseconds has so much uncertainty that it's not proof that you were faster And so this decision to only measure senti seconds leads to a surprising number of ties in swimming races