The lane you draw quietly rewrites your race

Inside lanes force tighter turns and outside lanes remove your opponents, and neither problem gets the attention it deserves.

Lane eight is a lonely place and lane one is a tight one, and a sport that has spent years perfecting photo-finish equipment still allocates this by draw and calls it fair.

The physics first. Running a curve means generating force toward the centre of the circle, and the tighter the radius, the more of your effort goes sideways rather than forward. The inside lane has the tightest radius on the track. An athlete there leans harder, loads one leg asymmetrically, and cannot reach the same top speed as someone in a gentler curve. Nobody disputes this. It is why the middle lanes are considered the good draw and why they are handed to the fastest qualifiers in the sprints.

The outside is a different problem, and a psychological one. You are ahead on the stagger with nothing in front of you, no information at all, and no way to judge whether you are winning or drowning. Some athletes handle this. Many go out too hard chasing a rival they cannot see, then discover at the top of the straight that the man in lane four has been sitting comfortably the whole way.

In the longer sprint the effect is bigger, because you are on a curve twice, once at speed and once already fatigued, and the second bend in lane one is where seasons end. Watch how many athletes drift wide at the exit. That is not carelessness. That is a body running out of the ability to hold a line.

So the ranking is roughly middle, then outside, then inside, and the sport knows it. Which raises the obvious question of why heats are still seeded in a way that can put a defending champion in lane one because they eased down to conserve energy in a previous round.

I would go further than reseeding. For the one-lap event I would run more finals with fewer lanes, using only the middle of the track, which is done occasionally and is treated as an oddity rather than as the fairer arrangement it plainly is.

Eight is a nice round number for a stadium. It is not a reason to hand someone a worse race.