Calculating swim speeds

The New York Times charted speed ranks during the women’s 4×100 freestyle relay. My favorite part is how they got the data, which wasn’t available, so they estimated through photos and timestamps:

The Times annotated a sequence of several hundred photographs to determine the speed of each athlete throughout the race. Speeds were calculated by combining the positions of the athletes with timestamp information from the images.

If the data you’re looking for isn’t readily available, it might just be a few steps away.

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