A dead heat is treated as a result that failed to arrive, to be cured by a finer instrument or an extra round. The sport with the finest instruments in existence wrote the opposite into its rulebook: where two athletes cannot be separated for a place, the tie stands. The foundation I work from says why. A tie is a reading with content — the record of a symmetry that held under the description the contest named — and a tiebreak does not sharpen it. It answers a second question and records the answer in the first question’s column. … readWhat Is a Tie