opopopza posted... There was a good post on Reddit from an actual swimming ref that explained why this rule is in affect.
It basically came down to creating excess waves in the pool while others are competing can affect their visibility as they are trying to finish (plus just poor sportsmanship). And the lane dividers can also break easily, you are never supposed to get on them.
Admittedly I know pretty much nothing about competitive swimming but that goes against what the vast majority of people who do follow the sport have said about the situation. He smacked the water in celebration pretty hard before getting up onto the lane divider but for that being supposed "poor sportsmanship" and potential disruption to the other swimmers that might cause, there doesn't seem to be anybody complaining about that.
Looking up articles about this whole thing led me down the rabbit hole of shitty sports rules and how Devon Allen was disqualified from a hurdles competition a couple years ago because the computer in the starting blocks said he started .099 seconds after the starting gun sounded and apparently you're not allowed to start until .1 second after because of bullshit about "the limit of human reaction time" and how "reacting" faster than that means they must have cheated by anticipating the starting gun or some such nonsense. Never mind that recent studies have shown that the actual possible best reaction time is probably closer to .08 seconds, it's such a ridiculously infinitesimal amount of time that nobody with the naked eye or even reviewing the footage frame by frame would see him starting any earlier than anybody else, and that humans have been running foot races for thousands of years and nobody's ever had a problem with a .001 second difference before computers were thrown into the equation. Like I get they want to make things as fair as possible but this is the kind of anal bullshit where in their attempts to be fair they seem to actually be making things more unfair in ridiculous ways instead.