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Most common stroke infractions do give you somewhat of an advantage, or they at least just totally change what even you are doing. Most kids' freestyle or crawl stroke is about twice as fast as their butterfly. The time penalties would have to be massive to make up for it. DQs above age thirteen are also pretty rare, so its clear that most kids can learn the strokes and the rules sufficiently to rarely DQ.
It is also somewhat hard to catch minor one time stroke infractions. If I glance over and think I saw an infraction and I describe any level of uncertainty then the Pool Ref will throw out the DQ. Usually stroke related problems are hard to see if they only happen once. Its usually that the kid is doing it wrong the entire time they are in my zone. I felt bad for the girl that did crawl during butterfly because I happened to be looking at her lane right as she did it. She had a 75% chance of being fine, but lost out on that cuz of bad luck.
One example is that you are allowed only two underwater pulls in breastroke off the wall before you are supposed to surface. I saw a kid do three, and that was after I missed him for about 5 meters off the wall. My estimate is that he actually did 4 or maybe even 5 underwater pulls. But I only reported seeing three because that is all I saw, even if I know via simple reasoning that he likely did 4 or 5. In his case if he had merely done three underwater pulls, which is illegal, I likely would not have caught him, because I would have only seen two of his pulls.
Okay that's a good point. The only viewing them 25% of the time adds some probabilistic volatility to things, but on average if someone gets away with 75% of their infractions then penalties ought to be four times as harsh to compensate, and at that point if they get harsh enough to guarantee someone last place you might as well just DQ them. It's not an ideal system, but it seems reasonable given the monitoring constraints.
Benefit of the doubt also goes to the swimmer. So maximum strictness if caught, but chances of being caught for non blatant rule violations is low.
The easiest one to catch is no two hand touch and that's also very easy to comply with.
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