Warbler said:

And Gaffer you are wrong, a 15 year old has no place being any part of the officiating crew of an Olympic event.

Really, Warb? My opinion is wrong? I did not think the definition allowed for that to be possible. I guess I learn something every day.

As for the ruling, I don't think you have to be an expert in the subject to realize that if it's a sport centered around a time limit, and the timing is compromised, then the results cannot be allowed to be kept. Imagine if this happened in basketball. There's five seconds left in the game. Fifteen seconds later, someone makes a basket because the clock broke. Should those points be counted, just because the broken clock still read :05, and therefore the buzzer never sounded? Or if in a swimming competition, the swimmer made it to the other side in 28.5 seconds, but the clock never stopped, so she has an official time of 1 hour and 16 minutes? That shouldn't be overturned? Again, common sense needs to prevail. Yet you seem more focused on whether a teenager can operate a clock than actually fixing the real injustice that did happen. You could have had a 30 year veteran of timing Olympic events or a genetically-enhanced mutant who can tell time better than a mechanical clock, but if a spectator accidentally drops an ice cream cone on the guy's head at the wrong moment, he's not gonna remember to time. The problem isn't that someone screwed up the timing. The problem is that the IOC isn't admitting there was a problem.