The One-Second Eternity

Date: July 30, 2012 | Location: London, England (ExCeL Centre)

Stakes: A spot in the Olympic gold medal fencing final

The Glitch: A Clock With No Way to Say "Almost Zero"

THE SET UP

One second is supposed to last one second.

At the 2012 London Olympics, it lasted long enough to change who got a chance to compete for the gold-medal.

It was a 5-5 tie between South Korea's Shin A-lam and Germany's Britta Heidemann, the defending Olympic champion, heading into a one-minute sudden-death round in the women's épée fencing semifinal. Épée is the heavyweight version of Olympic fencing. Two fencers face each other with thin, pointed swords, masks hiding their faces and protective gear covering their bodies. Unlike foil and sabre, almost everything is fair game: head, arms, legs, feet, even the hand holding the weapon. If both fencers strike at almost exactly the same moment, both can score.

That scoring machine is quick enough to catch two hits landing within the same blink of an eye. Before the sudden-death round began, officials flipped a coin and awarded one fencer "priority," a built-in tiebreaker. If the whole minute passed with no clean, decisive hit, whoever held priority would win automatically. Shin won the coin flip. That meant Heidemann needed just one clean hit to win the match. Shin just needed to stop her from landing one.

All Shin had to do was survive sixty seconds. That's harder than it sounds.

Twenty-four seconds. Fifteen. Nine, five, four. Five double touches inside thirty seconds, none of them clean, the clock burning down toward a Shin victory. Then one more double touch. The clock read 0:01. One second, one blink, stood between Shin and the gold-medal match.

THE GLITCH

Then the referee raised a hand, just to confirm the time remaining. Nothing dramatic. A routine check, the kind referees make a hundred times a match. The timekeeper, a Games volunteer, reached for a button and hit the wrong one. The clock didn't pause. It restarted. And the sliver of real time remaining ran out. By most accounts, that sliver was about two hundredths of a second: a fraction of a single blink, about as long as it takes a hummingbird to beat its wings once, gone before any human eye could have registered it.

Olympic fencing clocks in 2012 could only display whole seconds, nothing smaller. Once the board read 0:00, the referee had no way to know how much time had actually vanished. She could only put back the last number anyone had seen: 0:01.

Fencing's clock only runs during live action. Any touch, clean or double, stops it instantly for a ruling. Now, every restart put 0:01 back up again, the smallest number the clock could show. And because a whole épée exchange can finish in a fraction of a second, the clock never got the chance to legitimately tick all the way down to zero before the next touch stopped it again.

She called the fencers back en garde. They fenced. Double touch. Reset. Fenced again. Double touch again. A third time, same result. Then, on the fourth exchange, with the board still reading "0:01," Heidemann finally landed a hit nobody could dispute. She won 6-5.

In almost every scenario where the clock isn't touched, Shin walks away with the win, priority intact, and a chance at the gold medal hers. Instead, a full second was granted to her opponent, over and over again.

THE LONGEST HOUR

Shin's coach protested on the spot. Fencing's rules gave her one option: stay on the strip while the appeal was heard, or forfeit the right to argue at all. So she sat. Officials argued it out for roughly twenty minutes. The appeal failed. Shin didn't move. She sat on the piste (the strip) in tears for over an hour, in front of eight thousand people who had gone completely silent, before officials finally walked her off.

The result stood. Shin went on to lose the bronze-medal match. She walked out of an Olympics that she should have medalled in, perhaps even gold, with nothing to show for it.

THE FIX

But the flaw itself got fixed for good. Fencing's governing body rewrote the rule: once a clock drops below ten seconds, it has to count in tenths of a second, not whole seconds. Instead of jumping straight from 0:01 to 0:00, the board now counts down through 0:00.9, 0:00.8, all the way to 0:00.0. The exact glitch that stole Shin's match, a clock with no way to say "almost zero," cannot happen anymore. In a sport where a match can be won or lost in the time it takes to blink, the equipment had finally caught up to the speed of the athletes.

Shin got one thing back, though: the International Fencing Federation later gave her a special medal of its own, for what it called her aspiration to win and her respect for the rules. It wasn't gold. It wasn't even a placing. But it was the closest thing fencing had to an apology.

Rulemaker's Dilemma: Can following the rules ever produce an unfair result?