what is the tie-breaker when two athletes from different heats have the same final qualifying time to the hundredth? What if the wind is different?

It is now allowed to use the time to the thousandths of a second in order to break ties. If a tie still exists, then it goes to the person with the higher finish in his or her heat (i.e. if one of the two runners finished second in his/her heat, they would qualify before a person who finished third or fourth).

Yep, that's the way it is handled in college as well.
See below for the Pac-10 Men's 110m Hurdle Finals.

Men 110 Meter Hurdles
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Name Year School Finals Points
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Section 1 Finals Wind: 1.3

1 Oscar Spurlock USC 13.56 10
2 Jordan Paul California 13.66 8
3 Myles Bradley Stanford 13.75 6
4 Robert Williams Wash St. 13.95 5
5 Eric Hersey Oregon 14.23 4 14.222
6 Joseph Jackson Stanford 14.23 3 14.229
7 Chris Titsworth Arizona 14.39 2
8 Ryan Holmes California 14.60 1

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So wouldn't you go all the way out to the ten thousandth to break the tie and then go to heat place finish? Lynx goes 4 places to the right of the decimal point.

hank

The rules only go the to the thousandth.

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Rich Ede
Claremont, CA

A couple of years ago, one of my Alta Loma runners was tied to the thousanths and had to have a run off at the end of the Divisional Championships to qualify for the Masters.

FinishLynx can capture across a range of frames-per-second setting, partly due to the hardware/software version the timer is using. I will bet you that most of the timing operators in California at the high school level do not have the very top version, which likely is overkill for track and field. Instead, a setting of 900 to 1200 frames per second (to separate 10.443 seconds from 10.444 seconds, for example) is more than enough to separate the closest of races. In talking with some of the folks at Lynx over years, I've been told the only time they really need to go beyond 1,200 frames per second is when they time another ultra-fast sport.... It's called auto racing!

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"Cross-country is an individual sport. Succeeding in cross-country is a team sport."