[bell-cot]

Track & Field races stagger the starting positions, to compensate for the outer lanes of the track being longer. American football has the teams switch goals every quarter, to even out the advantages of having the wind at your team's back.

Why should swimming be different?

[danso]

NFL playoffs give home field advantage to the teams with the better regular season records.

[kqr]

Your examples are about making circumstances equivalent, thus canceling out any advantage. There's no way to e.g. switch lanes in swimming so we're bound to have some contestants advantaged.

In cases where some contestants have to be advantaged, the conventional solution in sports is to advantage the ones who performed better according to some metric.

I think it's unfair to reward those who were lucky or already advantaged somehow, but my wife who has a background in track and field thinks anything else would be unfair.

[bell-cot]

> ... no way to e.g. switch lanes in swimming so ...

Why couldn't you shorten the pool, from a swimmer's PoV, by putting (say) a very shallow plywood box against the wall of the pool at one end of each "non-center" lane? Yes, you might need to do some math & stats to figure out just how shallow a box. Or, you could use a feedback loop - boxes start very shallow, leading swimmers get to pick a lane, boxes adjusted, repeat.

[necovek]

I believe the main reasoning why this is fair is that this advantage is earned.

Would it be fairer to use randomly assigned lane? Then you get almost equal competitors in advantageous and disadvantageous lanes?

Isn't the top result in a year also used for qualification purposes (and thus lane assignment) for top-level competitions? Basically, you earn a spot in the best lane throughout the calendar year.

[kqr]

When I hear of an advantage being earned, I imagine it would go to the one who has put in the most effort, or been most inventive. Here, it goes to the one with the best metric. Metrics are a proxy for effort/inventiveness, but far from perfect. (As any software developer in a large organisation can attest.)

[darepublic]

if there is an advantage to a lane in swimming can't we add a certain small amount of time to compensate

[rcxdude]

It's very difficult to quantify the advantages of the middle lanes: it strongly depends on the style, swimmers, and pool.

[FrojoS]

How about separate pools for each lane?

[bronson]

Smaller pools are slower.