The Phelps Finish

I read an absolutely outrageous column on Slate yesterday. The journalist, who clearly is not familiar with swimming, was legitimately arguing that Phelps may not have touched the wall first in the hotly contested 100m butterfly. He argued that there was a gray area because it takes a certain amount of pressure to activate the touch pad and no one knows exactly what that amount of pressure is. Perhaps, Milorad Cavic was really at the wall first, but it took a longer time for him to apply the necessary amount of pressure because he was traveling much slower than Phelps.

This argument is of course rubbish. Swimmers win by .01 seconds all the time and no one throws a fit. Torres lost the 50m freestyle by .01 and there was almost no attention paid to that margin of loss. Phelps' case is different though. Since, to the naked eye, it looked like Cavic just got him. However, people refuse to believe in miracles. They love to feel like they have uncovered a conspiracy. They love going against the grain and something like Phelps winning 8 gold medals in one Olympics is something too easy to fall in love with, so they pull at straws, looking for any reason to back up their pathetically weak argument.

For those of you that don't know, there is a certain amount of pressure necessary to stop the touchpad. Otherwise, the pressure from water and waves in the pool would stop the time. After experiencing many a long finish myself, I know that the rate at which Cavic was traveling was more than enough to stop the clock. After all, it is not easy to duplicate a Cavic finish, one of the worst finishes one can have in butterfly and breaststroke. Here is the proof.

Some argue that the upturn of Cavic's fingers is proof that he is at the wall. Nope. Fingers do this when the hand is outstretched to touch a wall first. And the pull of the water on the fingers is enough to slightly bend them upward. From the photos, you can see Cavic's fingers are well into this position long before he touches the wall. He is stretching and the speed at which he is traveling is certainly fast enough to force his fingers upward even more than a stretch can. Hell, he wasn't going slow. He was swimming 100m of butterfly in 50.59 seconds.

Cavic lost this race. And the journalist has posted an update to his previous column, admitting, somewhat, that Phelps could have possibly beaten Cavic.