NC State slipped through prelims after appealing their disqualification and having the cal overturned. Freshman Ryan Held was called for an early take-off this morning with a -.03 reaction time. Tonight, Held was safe, but senior David Williams jumped on the anchor leg. His reaction time was not published in the results, but his first 25 split of 8.29 seemed a little too good to be true.
If their relay had been legal, that relay would have been NC State’s first ever NCAA relay title. They finished with a final time of 1:15.16. They also would have been the first non-powerhouse school to win a relay at the NCAA championships since Northwestern in 2007.
This is not the first time NC State has run into trouble with their exchanges. They had multiple relays disqualified last year at the NCAA Championships as well.
With the disqualification in the A final tonight, NC State loses all of their points for the event and Texas is bumped into first place with their time of 1:15.86.
For a full recap of the final session, click here.
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Live video stream by Iowa is horrible compared to that from women’s NCAA. Too much zooming in on lanes, just show the race!
Must be some good eyes to determine someone false started with a -.01 reaction time. How can the NCAA hold it’s championships and have “defective” equipment present and then not have back up available if there is a problem. This is a disgrace. I also am wondering about the Ohio St. and Louisville relays not being DQ’ed with much larger negative reaction times.
In the morning session, after NC State was called for the dq on the -.03 they used the video to determine that the equipment was not correctly calibrated (section 7 if I recall Gators post right).
From that point on, they used human judges only.
So the -.01 isn’t relevant. The finals dq was made by the human judges, I’m guessing they had 2 per lane and got dual confirmation that the anchor left early.
The saddest part is for them to win by a considerably large margin of .7, they could have had slow starts and still won….