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At least we got one medal out of it... poor Canadians can't catch a break!

http://www.iaaf.org/oly08/results/event ... s.html#det

Shot Put - M FINAL
15 August 2008 - 21:00
Position Athlete Country Mark .
1 Tomasz Majewski POL 21.51 (PB)
2 Christian Cantwell USA 21.09 .
3 Andrei Mikhnevich BLR 21.05 .
4 Dylan Armstrong CAN 21.04 (NR)
5 Pavel Lyzhyn BLR 20.98 (PB)
6 Yuriy Bilonoh UKR 20.63 (SB)
7 Reese Hoffa USA 20.53 .
8 Pavel Sofin RUS 20.42 .
9 Rutger Smith NED 20.41 .
10 Yury Bialou BLR 20.06 .
11 Ivan Yushkov RUS 19.67 .
. Adam Nelson USA NM .

We lost the Bronze by 10 centimetres?

That's only about 4/10ths of an inch!

Yikes!

Hmm ... maybe the Bronze medalist's 21.05 was wind-assisted?

And we only missed the Silver by 0.05m! That's still only about 2 inches!

OK, time to change the IAAF rule book - how about this ...

The competition starts by the officials putting a triangular "bar" on the field at the Olympic Qualifying distance. Each side of the triangular bar is a different color.

To "clear the bar", you must either throw further than the bar, or if you tick it, it cannot rotate to another color*.

All shot putters get 3 chances to clear the bar, or they can pass.

The bar then gets moved out by 10cm ... and so on. You know the rest!

We might have at least had a 3-way tie for the Silver that way!

Kirk

*I added the color-rotation rule so that officials wouldn't have to decide whether the bar was "hit" or not. You can tick the bar, as long as it doesn't dent the bar , and as long as it stays on the same-colored side. I'm ignoring the complication of the curvature of the distances from the shot put circle. I'll leave that up to you - or the IAAF - to figure out! We just need to level the playing field for all the field events!

meter. decimeter. centimeter. millimeter.

achtungpv, thanks for reminding me of the difference between a millimeter and a centimeter.

I edited my original post with the appropriate corrections. But still, we missed the Bronze by just 4/10ths of an inch? Ouch!

But now that I realize the difference between a cm and a mm, I feel 10 times better!

Kirk

i'm sure the measuring is very high tech and accurate to <1cm but I'd need meds to sleep tonight if I was him.