Well, if we start with physics I get interested. But please don't take my statements as criticism to the performances, which as I said are just huge and deserve total respect. It's more a matter of principles, and so I am not commenting on a specific competition - sorry if this is misleading in this thread.
It's not accurate to compare 1m in 124m with 0.08" in a 100m race, because the speed of the runners is not uniform - much faster at the end of course. 0.08" might seem like a huge margin next to the finish line, but we wouldn't be able to see that at the beginning of the race. For both marathon and 100m, there are 2 scopes. One is a direct winner, which is usually obvious because it's a parallel competition: guy A beats guy B. In this case 0.08" and 1' are huge margins.
The second scope is that of "record", and then I beg to differ. 100m records are timed to 0.01". At the average speed of the race, this corresponds to 10cm which could easily be the difference in chest size of two runners, or to the advantage at the starting block due to runner's height. Moreover, altitude, air temperature, wind speed, can easily affect the absolute result to more than this accuracy. So for me as a physicist, if a guy runs 100m in 9.67" it doesn't mean necessarily that he was faster than a guy in another time and place at 9.68" because we are not measuring the same distance under the same conditions. But for the media and the sponsors, this difference is worth millions. For marathons, 1' difference in absolute timing can easily be due to the elevation profile of the race, and to other environmental factors.
As for gauges: the fact that 3 watches from the same brand agree to less than 1 meter, only tells me that Suunto has a good quality control policy. It doesn't mean that the 3 watches are measuring the correct depth (of course I can imagine that Suunto has gone to great lengths to include salinity and other factors in their software, at least I hope so because my old D3 does give funny measurements).
But ultimately what counts is the rope, and the rope has to be measured "wet and stretched". I have seen this procedure once, and at least in that case I would not have bet much more than a cheap bottle on the final result. I am sure that for the Suunto Dive Off things are being done in the best possible way, but still when it's a record it means you are comparing with other competitions that you are not able to verify necessarily to the same accuracy. Think currents for example.
I have similar objections to CMAS measuring dynamic results to 1cm... but that's another story.
By the way, congratulations for adding 2m to your own record, which shows the way to go!
