Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2017 December 6

= December 6 =

What racing sport travels the least millimeters or body/car etc. lengths between clock increments? (at race end)
What racing sport has a photo finish or similar device that can distinguish 1st and 2nd place at the least millimeters or body/luge etc. lengths apart? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:48, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
 * What have you found so far? Lots of sports have photo finish or similar devices. Lots of sports can distinguish finishing places by extremely short distances, in most cases to the millisecond but some narrower as per photo finish. Which article are you trying to improve here? Nanonic (talk) 22:01, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Horse racing has used 1/10000ths of a second (this apparently isn't new). That article says a length is about 17 hundredths of a second so 0.0001 sec would be about 1/1700ths of a length. Horse length says a horse is about 8 feet long so 0.0001 seconds would be c. 1.4 millimeters. If 1 pixel was that 1.4 mm an image 10,000 pixels tall (a pretty large amount) would be slightly under 50 feet. Searching Churchill Downs gives a representative starting area width of 120 feet which while foreshortened to less in the camera view still shows that 0.0001 seconds is already getting close to the limit of current camera megapixels for horses.


 * In track and field, the longest Olympic race is 50 kilometers and you have to walk so it should be the slowest. The 2016 Olympics used a second camera. The 50 kilometer racewalk world record had an average speed of 8.77 miles an hour and the last Olympic 50km racewalk had 8.47 mph which both round to 0.4 millimeters. There's about 8 lanes of c. 4 feet (c. 10 meters in all) so track and field is also close to the limit of current megapixels.


 * I also found that swimming used to be able to seperate finishers by thousandths before a finish of only a few millimeters made them change the rules to call that a tie but they swim faster than racewalking divided by 10 so it isn't swimming. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:05, 7 December 2017 (UTC)


 * Alpine skiing at the 2014 Winter Olympics and Swimming at the 2016 Summer Olympics, to name two, calculated times to the hundredth of a second. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:42, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Here is an article on close Olympic finishes. The first example, swimming, featured a winning margin of just 4.7 millimeters.  C Thomas3   (talk) 22:58, 6 December 2017 (UTC)