If you put them in the slow lanes then there would be an incentive to place poorly in qualifying rounds.

Don't the qualifying rounds determine whether you get to compete or not? So if someone intentionally slowed down, even a fraction of a second, there's a chance they wouldn't get to compete at all.

Yeah, but it would create weird incentives where e.g. if two people are way ahead of the pack, one of them wants to finish after the other. So do they just wait until the rest of the field catches up and then try to trick the other guy into hitting the wall first?

Better to just avoid it by keeping incentives aligned with winning your qualifying heat.

Or they could randomize the order?

Good point. Some events do in fact do that.

But then there is no incentive to try to win the qualifiers.

Why not give them a choice of Lane?

Everyone would choose the middle lanes anyway.

Draw slips from a hat

Tactically this may not be valid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQNY5htc9_k

When the US 4x100m swim relay beat France about three olympics ago (the one where Phelps won all those medals), France was comprehensively faster man-for-man aside from Phelps in that relay.

The US won because Jason Lezak, the anchor, swam in the wake of the final French swimmer (a draft basically) and was able to save energy and pass him.

If the US and French had been separated by a lane, the US would have lost.

If you are slightly faster (and especially if you go out faster) than your #2 rival, you want to have a lap between you to deny them the draft.

Randomize the lane assignments.

Not sure if you are being satirical, but yes that's the point.

The entire point of qualifiers in most sports is to reward better participants - otherwise they would have incentive to sandbag their performance or perform other shenanigans for preferential matchups.

You get rewarded by qualifying. If you perform better in the heat that doesn't mean you should get an advantage in the race. Random allocation would be better.

> should

Why do you believe this should be the case? Keep in mind the majority opinion of most forms of racing and other competitions is to reward competitors for their qualifying or heat performances by assigning the most valuable starting positions to the top qualifiers. This is generally considered more fair than randomizing the final’s lane assignment (or grid order, etc) because it reduces the chance of BS in the finals itself and avoids perverse incentives in the qualification rounds.

I get it with motor racing like F1 because of the linear nature of the track, plus during the qualification laps they have a clear track and are not jockeying for position.

My reservation with swimming is that if you were randomly assigned to a middle or side lane in the qualification stages, your advantage or disadvantage is compounded as the competition proceeds. It's not clear to me how lane assignments are conducted for heats; perhaps they use a seeding system.

https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/swimming-101-olympic-compet...

The system isn't there to be fair, it's there to be entertaining.

If you wanted a fair system, there would be no qualifiers and no simultaneous racing. You would just have everyone compete at home and mail in times whenever they have a new record. Like eg speedrunning for computer games is done today, or like any world records for fastest time are done.

> I get it with motor racing like F1 because of the linear nature of the track, plus during the qualification laps they have a clear track and are not jockeying for position.

Track conditions can change throughout qualifying so that the later qualifiers might have a slightly faster or slower track.

You already get rewarded for better performance in the heat by being allowed to participate in the race!

Yes...that's what I'm saying.