cyclenutnz wrote:
enduro50 wrote:
Is Sam Ward injured?
Retired. He is really torn up by how he has been treated.
Sophie Corbidge has also retired, for the same reasons, but has been able to move on quickly by starting her teaching career,
Ryan Sissons retired last year because he could see which way the wind was blowing (even after he won Mooloolaba).
Now no athletes in NZ program over 25.
The first warning sign that your system is broken is where you have your up & coming super stars retiring... Sissons has battled with this for years, and he saw the deck being stacked to get screwed over yet again, so I am not surprised that he stepped away. Ward and Corbridge both have lots of potential and are viable options for NZ, but for the obvious politics. Unfortunately the push for reforms will need to come from their membership to show their discontent with how the federation is being run. I like Hayden Wilde, he's an entertaining athlete, but honestly the best outcome for the federation will be for him to have a terrible race in Tokyo and for them to flame out in the relay, so that NZ is forced to look in a mirror and re-think their approach.
On the Aus side, I agree that it's likely Birt, Willian and Hauser, in theory it could be Royle instead of Willian, but really only if you want to use him in a strategic role in the individual race (and when I say strategy, I mean have him in the swim break in the outside chance that you can't pull Birtwhistle close enough to be in the dash for cash). On the ladies side, it comes down to whether you think they put NVC in the relay with Gentle or not, for my money I'd say pick Jeffcoat for the relay, because if she's on, she's a better relay athlete than NVC, but they could also go with hedgeland for the future to give her a taste, because she will be one of their stars come Paris, or Jackson as a wild card (again, her brilliant days of late are few and far between, but if she happens to have one in the individual race, she could land on a podium).
On the whole Sutton sitch, for my money, I can't understand why a female athlete would work with him, given what is broadly known about his past. This is another case of one of those situations where the lack of a Global athlete safety oversight body rears its head, and that he can still operate. His presence in the registry makes him radioactive in many places, but there are others, such as Switzerland where he can. If you had a global oversight body that was able to enforce a global band, it becomes easy to regulate, because you could use a contamination rule (like they do with the "doping doctors" like Ferrari, or doping coaches like Salazar, Charlie Francis, etc.) where athletes working with banned coaches will be ineligible to compete (I'm sure they'll still find ways to consult via carrier pigeons or whatever, as I am sure Ferrari still does, but at least they will not be in direct regular contact with athletes).
On the Swiss selection, agreed, I'm sratching my head why it was Briffod selected, or Florian, ahead of Andrea. Any of the 3 could domestique for Studer, but only Briffod is actually a viable threat for a podium at that level... any one of them could be a viable relay option (throwing aside conspiracy theories of some mystical pull that Sutton has with the federation that got his athlete selected instead of someone else, Andrea may have been chosen because he was the only one willing to commit to a domestique role, rather than also harboring individual ambitions).