The Discovery of the First QuestionBoth articles from the Los Angeles Times go hand in hand and each one has more details about what went on. For instance, the first article written by Matt Farmer entitled, "Malfunctioning Timer Jeopardizes Meet Results" discusses how Division 1 meet manger, Bob McGuire and Southern Section commissioner Dean Crowley, both were blindsided by head operator of Accutrack's, Joe Raya, mistakes in Division 1 preliminaries. That Joe was starting the races hand timed because he discovered that the percussion device was not working properly, but did not tell any officials that they were doing so. Bob McGuire quoted in 1994 that, "They had a glitch and nobody made me aware of it. It was being started manually." This is the correct thing to do when automatic timing systems fail, the race must be hand timed; however, no officials knew about the malfunction and times that should have been rounded to the nearest tenth were still being recorded to the nearest hundredth of the second. When Southern Section commissioner, Dean Crowley heard about the problem Monday night he was surprised by saying, "That's news to me". In addition, "We had a meeting on Sunday and no one said diddly to me about it. We had no problems with the Division I meet. If there were problems, why didn't this come out? We ran this race Saturday and no one said anything to (Southern Section officials). This is a major deal in my opinion. If that happened, I don't understand why Raya is keeping this thing a big secret. This is incomprehensible. If (the Accutrack) malfunctioned and (Raya) operated that thing and didn't tell anybody, then I have a real problem with that." Clearly, Dean Crowley was furious how the situation unfolded itself to him, which brings up the questions. If the percussion device was not working properly would the wind gauge not work either? The Discovery of the Second QuestionThe next day John Ortega, from Los Angeles Times published an article about the repercussions of the malfunction of Accutrack. As stated, "15 athletes required to take part in runoffs Thursday at Gahr High in Cerritos to determine the final qualifying berths in six events for the Southern Section track and field championships." The malfunction seeding times for the finals were inaccurate and non-automatic times before the start of the 100-meter-hurdles had to be hand timed converted. This required 15 athletes to re-run for qualifiers in the 1994 C.I.F Division 1 Finals. However, the real problem is the timing malfunction of Jason Medearis. Since Jason ran a 13.64 wind-aided the mark has to be converted to a hand timed of 13.7. So this brings up the second question. If the times are converted into hand timed should the wind aided not count?
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