2023 Men’s Ivy League Swimming & Diving Championships
- Wednesday, February 22 – Saturday, February 25, 2022
- Prelims 11:00 AM / Finals 6:00 PM
- Katherine Moran Coleman Aquatics Center, Brown University, Providence, RI
- Defending Champions: Harvard University
- Live Results on Meet Mobile
- Daily Results PDFs posted post-session here
- Live Video (ESPN+)
- Championship Central
- UPDATED Day 1 Finals Results (PDF)
The Ivy League announced that it had overturned all the disqualifications from Wednesday night’s finals session.
“The disqualifications from Wednesday’s evening session were overturned by the championship head official due to likely system malfunctions from the relay takeoff pads.
“The change occurred following the meet committee’s decision to remove the usage of the relay takeoff pads for the remainder of the championship. Despite the relay takeoff pads passing the manufacturer’s testing protocols, the meet committee shared concern regarding inaccurate readings which ultimately led to its decision.”
On Wednesday night, during the timed finals of the 200 medley relay, Penn was disqualified for an early takeoff. One event later, Penn, Cornell, and Dartmouth were all disqualified in the 800 free relay. As eye-raising as those results were, the relay takeoff pads showed even more early departures – as many as ten – leading to concern about the accuracy of the pads.
The controversy continued during Thursday morning’s prelims session, with too-fast reaction times showing up uniformly in the results. After a formal protest was lodged, the meet committee met again at 4:00 PM before finals to make a pronouncement. Their decision to remove the relay takeoff pads for the rest of the championship and to reinstate the disqualified relays from Wednesday night means that the team scores have been updated as follows:
Team Scores After Day 1
- Harvard / Princeton – 120
- –
- Columbia / Yale – 106
- –
- Brown / Cornell – 96
- –
- Penn – 94
- Dartmouth – 90
Have the officials gone back to compare the stopwatch times to the electronic times? A very simple check to confirm the accuracy of the electronic times. If the stopwatch (not plunger) times are slower than electronic times, they’ve definitely got a problem!
The problem appears to be with the relay judging pads, not the touchpads. Stopwatches don’t record relay reaction times.
Yea Braden, I agree that stopwatches don’t have anything to do with reaction times, but that was not my point. Daktronics has had incidences of having some faulty wiring issues inside their start boxes. I would simply like SwimSwam to ask this question: Has an official at the meet looked at the hand stopwatch times vs.the electronic times? This will help verify that the whole system is running accurately. If the stopwatch times are slower than the electronic ones, there is something wrong. If so this will be giving advantaged times that will effect who gets invited to the NCAA meet and so I think it is a valid question to ask.
At one time, late 90s, the NCAA rule book had this requirement for the meet referee to confirm that the timing console/touchpad connection was correctly configured to insure proper starting of the timing system.
Basically, the Colorado system timing starts when a open circuit is closed, while the Omega and Dactronics systems timing starts when a closed circuit is opened.
If incorrectly connected the timing of a race will start when the beep sound ENDS.
Good call
Ok now do the same magic on the Patriot League
And Centennials.
This was the right call. It is sometimes too easy to rely on technology, so glad the officiating team could back off. Was there human judging of the takeoffs in the first session?
Are the electronic times for the events accurate? Did the officials compare the backup timers’ stopwatch times to the electronic times? If the Daktronics electronic system has a delayed start, as has reportedly occurred with systems in the past, the reaction times at the start could be displayed as unusually fast, and the overall electronic time for the event would also be faster than it actually was. I hope the officials check and compare the stopwatch times to the electronic times. The stopwatch times should never be slower than the electronic timing system times, because of human reaction delay in starting the stopwatch. I hope Daktronics will help us understand what triggered relay exchange reaction times to be negative when… Read more »
Based on what we know, it’s likely an issue with the RJPs not the touchpads. Past issues have been touchpad related, and if there’s no issue with the touchpad, they’d line up with stopwatches.
There was a Daktronics timing system issue at Liberty University that resulted in the timing system not starting for .39 seconds after the startbox horn/light went off. Daktronics explained it as either an improperly soldered circuit in either the starter’s microphone/start button or in the startbox. As a result, the meet officials planned to add .39 seconds to all results that occurred prior to finding the system error.
Your article from March 23, 2018 stated,
“A representative from the company was on hand at the meet on Thursday. The issue is reported to have involved a miswiring of the timing boxes that both control the communication between the starter and the swimmers. For those unfamiliar with starting systems, the… Read more »
I believe the difference is that this was an initial system install issue with Liberty and it certainly isn’t with Brown.
SwimSwam should take some credit.
There goes the chaos scenario of Penn DQ’ing all 5 relays that I was secretly hoping for. Nothing against Penn, I just enjoy chaos
I’ve heard Penn swimmers (years ago but still under Schnur) brag about jumping relay exchanges. Thought karma had finally caught up to them
good