The screenshot you see below is taken milliseconds before the conclusion of an Olympic gold medal race, a race in which the swimmer in the top lane – Michael Phelps – wins. (Don’t be fooled by the visible “play” option, it really is a screenshot. The video is here if you’d like to watch the race.)



The swimmer in the bottom lane, Milorad Cavic, is inches away from victory, which makes what I noted above hard to square away. Logically assuming Cavic is moving fast enough to be side-by-side with Phelps in the above image after nearly a minute of swimming, it’s tough to envision how quickly Phelps got from there to putting pressure on the wall before Cavic. But he did, even if just by micro-microooo milliseconds.



Just a few frames earlier, Phelps was at a distance from the wall where he could’ve elected to go for the reach-and-glide as Cavic is doing. He had to make the split-millisecond decision to do that – and...