Heat method is weird.

Does anyone else find that the Heat, SemiFinal, Final system in the events like swimming in particular (and other sports) is either outdated or just not really... good. I mean, I noticed the other day that in the 50m freestyle (I think) the Australian guy broke the world record in the semifinals. Then the finals came around and he didn’t even medal. ...yet he’s the fastest. I dun understand.

Do you have a better system???

I’m glad you asked.

Actually, I don’t know in what sense these ideas would be ‘better’... but they’d be different.

Here it is. It seems to me that maybe the heat method worked in, oh, say, 700BCE, when they didn’t have stop watches and would have found it difficult to distinguish who was the fastest in races that were run at different times. So it probably would have been a good idea to just take the first 3 from each group and so on and so forth, until left with 1 final race.

But now we have stopwatches. And we can measure exactly how fast all the competitors are. Why even have competitors compete in more than 1 race? Just time everyone (like we already do), and who ever races the fastest time wins the medal.

Yeah, there could be objections like (1)“Maybe the athletes want to do more than just compete once,” or (2)“What if one of the races is measurably different e.g. environmental effects,” or (3)“Having several races means that it separates the truly great competitors because they have to compete at the top level for several races, rather than just some athletes who may only be able to do it once.” There could be other reasons I haven’t thought of, and please suggest them if you think of some.

(1) is perhaps fair, since they may want to compete more than once. So, just make all the competitors compete several times (that might even be fairer), then average the times, or just take the best time.
(2)Also possibly a problem, though possibly not very large, and having several repeated ‘heats’ could help ‘smooth’ that out, if times were averaged.
(3)Also solved by having several heats.

So I guess my suggestion amounts to having several heats where all the competitors have a few rounds and their times are averaged. They could even mix up the competitors.
This might be more time consuming, and definitely wouldn’t have as much ‘Zing!’ as seeing someone blitz a final (which I do enjoy). But remember, this is kinda like the parallel between the Premier League and shitty ‘exciting’ Australian Football league (or whatever it’s called), isn’t it?

What I find strange with the swimming is that in the relays you can have one team compete in the heat and then use a different team for the final. WTF? Seriously, WTF?
I think they all get medals too. That would be one very hollow victory.

Wow, I didn't know that. That's really pretty stupid, and makes no sense. That's almost like having someone else compete for you in an individual final.