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This transcript of an interview with Keith Lewis, the co-director of the Miss California Pageant, must be among the strangest artifacts ever produced by the creepily enthusiastic industry that is the American pageant circuit. (Miss California, you'll recall, is the contestant who believes "the way she was raised" to be sufficient justification for her policy preferences.) In the course of explaining that yes, his organization did pay for Carrie Prejean's boob job, Lewis argues that the organization did not "encourage" her to surgically restructure her chest area (but did bankroll it!), that the procedure was paid for simply so Miss California would have a positive self-image (though "of course" size matters in the competition), and that he totally agrees it's time to "look at the way we perceive real women." From an appearance with Maggie Rodriguez of the The Early Show:
LEWIS: ... it's a personal choice. Well, I think that it's about how a woman feels about herself. In terms of, for me, it's not a personal choice that I would recommend. But at the same time, I know so many women that have done the procedure and feel better about themselves and the way they present themselves.
And I think that's the question is, whether or not, when you're looking at that procedure as an option, am I going to feel better about myself? It's not about one night. It isn't about one night of competition. And doing a procedure like that for one night of competition would be foolish...
RODRIGUEZ: ... if you have a flat chest, what are you supposed to do?
LEWIS: You use chicken cutlets. You use tape. You use anything that you can to enhance the line. There's lots of tricks of the trade. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to go to that next level.
RODRIGUEZ: I wonder if you should change the rules and maybe not judge it so much on proportion.
I find both sides of this exchange deeply bizarre, perhaps because I lack the imaginative capacity to envision a swimsuit competition not premised on a certain conception of the female body. What are they going evaluate? Perkiness? Gait? The actual swimsuit?
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Some people just still don't buy that Michael Phelps won the 100-meter fly by a razor-thin one-hundredth of a second. Even Slate's own Will Saletan is skeptical, wondering if the sensitivity of the touch pads came into play. I've got to respectfully disagree.
I was an extremely amateur swimmer—the highest championships I made it to were zones, not nationals—but I've been to my fair share of meets and slammed into many a touch pad. Saletan writes, "It's not who touches first. It's who triggers the sensor first." The problem is he's making a distinction that does not exist in the sport. In swimming parlance, whoever triggers the sensors IS who touched first—the person who touches hard enough to stop the clock first via the touch pad. (No one goes around saying they got "sensor-triggered" out. They say they got "touched out.") There's no photo finish in swimming (and I realize they can reconstruct high-level races with photos in extreme cases like this, but the photos are backup; the touch pad determines the winner), nor does anyone care if you lightly brush the pad first. If you don't hit it hard enough to stop the clock first, you lose.
I can assure you that gliding to a finish, as every swimmer at that level knows, can be the kiss of death. I knew it at age 12, so I'm pretty confident that someone at Cavic's level of expertise knows it. Maybe he thought he didn't have enough room for a half-stroke (and Phelps, who took a chance in taking an extra half-stroke, took the right one); maybe he thought that half-stroke would cost him time or that he was far enough ahead to be first with one last full stroke. Saletan asks if Cavic "had realized how much pressure was required [to stop the touchpad], would he have shortened his stroke as Phelps did, trying to trigger the sensor first, instead of trying to touch the wall first?" In addition to there being no distinction between "trigger" and "touch," I can guarantee that Cavic most definitely was "trying to trigger the sensor first," even if he didn't know how many kilograms per square centimeter were required to do so. There's a reason the saying about finishing a race in swimming is to go "Not to the wall but through the wall." Cavic just didn't make the same smart decision to hit the wall at full velocity that Phelps did, and it cost him.
This type of loss in not uncommon in swimming—Darra Torres lost the gold this Olympics by one one-hundredth of a second herself in the 50 freestyle—and the touch pads measure to thousandths of a second for a reason (to ensure accuracy for the hundredths of a second that the times will be recorded in). Sometimes you just get touched—or sensor-triggered or however you want to say it—out, end of story.
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