The fastest loser spot ruins the heat it appears in

Qualifying by time on top of qualifying by place creates two incompatible races inside the same nine lanes.

Three qualify automatically and two go through on time. Read that sentence again, because it asks the runners in heat one to race a field they cannot see.

Automatic places create a clean contest. Beat the people beside you. Everything else is noise. Add time qualifiers and you bolt a second, invisible opponent onto the same race, one whose performance will not be known for another forty minutes. Now an athlete in fourth has to decide whether the pace has been fast enough that fourth is safe, in a heat where the leaders may have jogged the last hundred metres precisely because they had nothing to gain.

The result is systematically unfair by draw. Early heats are run blind. Later heats know the target, which is an enormous advantage, and every runner in the last heat can see the clock and calculate exactly what is required. Rotating which heat goes first does nothing, because the information asymmetry is structural.

It gets worse in the middle-distance events, where a tactical heat can be won in a time slower than sixth place in the next heat. Athletes who ran the race correctly, by the rules of the contest in front of them, are eliminated by people who ran a different race. I have watched runners get knocked out for the crime of winning too easily.

The fix that fixes most of it is unglamorous. Fewer, larger heats with more automatic qualifiers, and time qualifiers as a last resort rather than a design feature. Or run heats simultaneously where the track allows, which happens in some field events and is treated as unthinkable on the oval.

The objection is television, again, and the wish for a tidy ladder of exactly twenty-four to twelve to eight. The sport has decided a neat bracket is worth some arbitrary eliminations.

I would rather have an untidy bracket and a fair one. If the argument for time qualifiers is that they rescue good athletes from bad heats, notice how often they actually rescue athletes from good heats, and how often the person genuinely wronged is the one who led their heat, slowed at the line, and went home.