Originally Posted by OzPunter

I spent most of last night and much of today pondering over Sectional Times data for several races.
...
I had to refer to results to get some beaten margin lengths but overall came up with the following conclusions,

It is possible to look at all runners as a group and then calculate the Speed in Meters/Sec for each runner and
taking the lowest time for the section (the leaders time) determine the distance traveled by each other runner
in the leaders time for that segment…

This is done by first determining the runners speed in mps by dividing 200m
by the runner’s time e.g. 200m / 12sec = 16.66 Meters per second.

You then multiply each other runners speed by the leader’s time and you can determine how far they had run
when the leader went past the 200m sensor. e.g if the second runners speed was 16.35 mps then they would
have run 16.35 X 12 = 196.20 meters, or be 3.8 meters behind the leader.

You can calculate this out for each segment, add them all up and it generally agrees with finishing margins
posted in the results.


OzPunter