[Back In The Saddle]

Really, what concrete information? That it takes somewhere in the neighborhood of roughly 1 second to swing that arm? That's not concrete. It's definitely not accurate to a 10th of a second. And it's only definite, whatever that means, because the rules say it is.

"There's got to be some time on there", OTOH, is a true statement. And, unlike the arm swing or counting one-ba-na-na, two-ba-na-na, it's a statement that makes no (false) claim to precision. It simply is statement of fact. If the whistle clearly sounded before the horn..."there's got to be some time on there."

And everybody in the arena that heard whistle before horn knows it is a true statement.

So riddle me this...

If the rules consider a timepiece as wildly varied and demonstrably inaccurate as an official's count, visual or silent, "definite information" suitable for correcting the clock...

If that very same rule also specifically grants us permission to use "other official information", while neither specifying nor restricting what that means...

How can you seriously argue that, in this specific case, the official's estimate is not "other official information"?

I'm not talking about a SWAG here. I'm talking about a well-informed estimate, calculated from an abundance of very clear and definite information, which includes the official's own "observation" of how much time elapsed between the whistle and the horn. An observation, I hasten to add, made with the same gray matter timepiece the rules require him to use to time short periods of time, timings that are specifically defined as "definite information".