Unless my eyes deceived me as I followed the event’s live TV feed showing the awesome extent of this tough judgement, the official at the heart of the process had access to a nifty sellotape (other brands are available and may have been in evidence on this occasion just saying) dispenser on his desk.

It would have had one of those little serrated blades attached to it. Talk about cutting-edge technology!

And if memory serves the main body of it was constructed of dayglo pink plastic – so we’re talking relatively modern material here.

I mean, it was only in 1907 that Belgian chemist Leo Baekland pioneered the first fully synthetic plastic, beating his Scottish rival chemist James Swinburne to the patent office by one day.

Just imagine what might have happened if they had both rocked up to that office at exactly the same time. How to decide on which man should hold a patent that looked as if it might be worth considerably more than £10, perhaps even more than £100 in future years?

Although, thinking about it as I now do, any official who might have been called upon to make that choice could easily have employed the same system that was used in Belgrade yesterday afternoon - save obviously for having use of a plastic sellotape (other brands are available) dispenser.

Anyway, for those of you who may have been distracted by modern life’s other pressing issues yesterday, here is how that Belgrade 22 process went as it sought to choose between Britain’s Dave King and Japan’s Shusei Nomoto, both of whom had finished third in their semi-finals in 7.565sec.

In the presence of the two athletes involved, and their respective team managers, and about 50 other assorted bods milling around, the Official In Charge of Deciding solemnly placed upon his desk vest labels bearing the names "King" and "Nomoto."

After smoothing these two pieces of paper out and carefully adjusting them so that they were exactly parallel to each other, he then picked them up, folded them precisely and at this point we were watching Rowan Atkinson playing the insanely thorough store gift-wrapper in Love Actually, adding layer upon loving and painstaking layer to the process of garnishing and beautifying the boxed present an increasingly impatient and paranoid purchaser, played by Alan Rickman, was secretly buying for a woman who was not his wife.

Anyway, where were we?

Yes, and then, as if he had lost patience with the whole business, the official scrunched the pieces of paper up and randomly applied to each of them a section of sellotape (you know what comes here) from the very modern plastic dispenser before ramming them into what looked like a big dark bag. Because it actually was a big dark bag.

At this point the process took on ritualistic elements as a sheepish, bespectacled female official was bidden to transform herself, momentarily, into a High Priestess, dipping her hand into the sacred depths to discover the True Qualifier. Who turned out to be Dave King.

After commiserating with his not beaten opponent, King went off to prepare for his first major Championship final - where he came a creditable sixth. Nomoto, meanwhile, wandered out into the corridor in a daze of misery, hands to his face, Belgrade 2022 rucksack on his back.

It could all have been so different. For a while they had been talking about tossing a coin.

It is said of England’s famed cricketer of olden days, W G Grace, that when he was asked to call during coin tosses over who would have the choice of batting he would wait until the penny was in the air before calling out "The Lady" - thus covering himself whether it landed showing the face of Queen Victoria or that of Britannia.

I just sellotaped that fact to the blog. (Other facts are available).

Oddly enough another British athlete, Michael Rosswess, was involved the last time a similar turn of events occurred in these same Championships, when he finished level with Marc Blume of Germany in the men’s 60m semi-final at the 1995 edition in Barcelona, with both sprinters clocking 6.619sec.

That actually was decided by the toss of a coin - Rosswess lost and Blume went into the final, where he finished fifth.

If memory serves I once got into a spot of bother after writing a piece about Rosswess for The Independent because I apparently described him as a male stripper. I maintained I had written, correctly, that his manager had once worked as a male stripper. I blamed the subs (other excuses are available).

I just sellotaped that memory to the blog. (Other memories are dimly available).

Shortly before the London 2012 Olympics got off its blocks I was with a press group that visited the Aquatics Centre to meet Peter Huerzeler, the former President of Omega, who was overseeing the timing operation.

In the decade or so before the Games, swimming had had numerous dead heats. At the previous year’s World Championships in Shanghai, for instance, golds had been shared in the men’s 100m backstroke and women’s 100m freestyle.

In London 2012, for the first time in an Olympics, the timing at the Aquatics Centre was dealt with by equipment capable of discerning differences of one ten thousandth of a second.

Indeed, as Huerzeler avowed enthusiastically as he stood poolside amid the boom and splash of a pool filled with preparing Olympians of all nations, the technology was already available to measure even more minute fractions of time: "We have the technology for one millionth of a second. But what is the use?" he said.

It is part of the requirement of international sporting timing systems that they can provide data at a level beyond what is required for the purposes of competition.

But then, and now, swimming remains on hundredths but not thousandths. Thus nobody knew what the big numbers were for the likes of 2011 backstroke dead-heaters Camille Lacourt and Jeremy Stravius, or Aliaksandra Herasimenia of Romania and Jeanette Ottesen of Denmark, who shared gold in the women’s 100m freestyle.

No one except Huerzeler, that is. And he could still tell you. But then he would have to kill you.

"At Shanghai, all the journalists came to me and asked who was really the winner in the men’s 100 freestyle," he said. "But I never give away that information because it is unfair against the swimmers. I am the only man who knows - and I will never tell to the journalists."

The problem with introducing thousandths of seconds in the swimming results, as he explained, comes down to this: one thousandth of a second is equivalent to around 1.7 millimetres, and as most pools are built to a tolerance of up to one centimetre, who is to say whether each swimmer swims an exactly similar distance?

"We can only use thousandths of a second when we can guarantee that each lane in the pool is exactly the same length," Huerzeler said. "Otherwise it is not feasible."

So maybe the Blue Peter solution to matching times was not such a bad one after all.

Actually I may have been wrong about that sellotape dispenser.

It may have been green.