[ggambetta]

Wondering if it would make more sense to award shared gold/silver/bronze to athletes whose times fall within a certain distance of each other. The difference between 10.00 and 10.01 is much smaller than the difference between "gold" and "silver".

Put it another way, both (10.00, 10.01) and (10.00, 20.00) map to (gold, silver), despite being qualitatively very different.

[frou_dh]

That kinda conflicts with the psychology of motivation for elite-level training, where they know/feel there'll be a reward for putting in that extra training effort to be a tiny sliver better on the day.

[omoikane]

I have a similar opinion, where if the difference comes down to milliseconds and race comes down to who has a longer fingernail or who has a thicker torso, I am not sure those were the attributes that the athletes were meant to compete on.