Not because he was unqualified. He was the 1992 gold medalist. He ran just 0.02 seconds short of the world record in 1993. And recently, he even beat this year's champion, Bailey.

Christie was ejected because he was too fast. The judges and "science" said so, but they were wrong.

As technology advances, its uses in athletics abound, from aerodynamic bicycles to advanced drug testing. But this is a case where technology should have gone the way of NFL's instant replay: out.

Somehow, scientists have figured that it is humanly impossible to have a start faster than 0.100 seconds.

So they set their machines to this magic number and anyone who dares to push the envelope of human potential is not celebrated but forced off the track.

Could these be the same scientists who centuries ago said the world was flat? Could these be the same scientists who said we could never put a man on the moon? Could these be the same scientists who said no one would ever jump higher than 8 feet?

If so, then someone should tell Christopher Columbus, Neil Armstrong and Javier Sotomayor that there have been some serious measuring errors along with a few pretty good hoaxes pulled on the world.

I suppose an error on the machine's part is out of the question. After all, machines are always right, aren't they? And everyone complaining about IBM's computerized scoring service must be wrong, right?

But maybe in this case, the machine was wrong, or Christie broke through another one of "science's" barriers. In this case it was science, and not Christie, that was wrong, and science should have been ejected.

The announcers and the 85,000 spectators at the Olympic Stadium agreed.

Christie is a qualified runner, and an Olympic champion at that. To remove him from what was perhaps the toughest race ever in the Olympics removes legitimacy from the race itself.

If they were going to remove Christie, they should have stopped the entire event and reviewed their false start policy before ruining this athlete's dreams.

This regulation takes faith out of man and puts it all in machine.

It places a limit on human potential; it says that people cannot break barriers or overcome limits, that athletes should not run too fast.

But isn't that what the Olympics are all about?