False Starting

In the spirit of the trials (not that false starting is a major issue for a 26.2-mile race), did anyone else notice how the majority of last summer's ridiculousness was incurred during the men's races? As it turns out, this is not just happenstance... there is actually a problem with the reaction time criteria. The rule currently considers that an athlete has false started if he/she applies about a 25kg force to the starting blocks within 100msec of the gun. The selection of 100msec as the "fastest possible reaction time" was based off of data from a small study involving 8 sprinters. However, none of these athletes were Olympians, and none of them were female, so another group decided to analyze a much larger number of elite athletes from both genders. They analyzed data from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and concluded that it was statistically very unlikely that men can react faster than 109msec and women faster than 121msec. Why the discrepancy? Well, the researchers believe that it's not because men can actually react faster than women, but rather that men can develop the needed force quicker than women due to more powerful leg muscles. So, instead of having two different allowable reaction times, the researchers recommend reducing the "trigger force" to ~19kg for women.