the Spanish league is pretty solid and has a lot of depth since they have a lot of draft legal races.
the bundesliaga had buschuetten in the males and that club had money but the team was stopped like 1.5 years ago, they were not possiy level but likely the level bellow in the French league. Witten in the females is also good but the rest of the teams is more like average or bottom of the French d1
ie overall the French club system is just head and shoulders above any country.
a couple pro athletes I spoke with recently told me the bundesliga still has much more money than the spanish one, but I’m not close enough to details.
yes the money is better in Germany but of course it depends what level you are
as it drops very quickly
what I was more referring to is that the atheltes level in Spain and Germany is fairly similar
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Be nice if Hauser races, but as said in the report he probably won’t.
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Just listening to another Waugh interview about Paris selection and its pretty clear the appeal and negativity she got, effected her build up and performance.
I hope British Tri have taken all this on board and have taken steps to avoid a similar scenario.
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Federations will never get it right, as someone will always get left out who “deserved” the spot too more often then not. Especially the top federations when you have 3-5 athletes all ranked so highly etc. this isn’t Bermuda or Swiss where by default you know who was getting the spot. Someone from GB/US/German (other feds as well) will always be world class type 10-15 talent and get left off the team. So no athlete deserves that type of treatment, but that’s not really a federation issue. That’s fans being assholes in an environment where athletes are so easily accessible these days. I don’t know what a federation can really do to not have asshole fans be asshole fans other then to wipe clean social media accounts.
Having clear criteria would help. Don’t think that the US women selection was less of a shitshow.
Right but they aren’t, lol. It’s federations
GB’s is one of the tougher standards to auto qualify, so then it by default goes to discretion, when then of course becomes a “shitshow”.
Well discretion’s gonna cause this. And it happens in any sport where there is discretionary decision making on who gets to participate/race/be part of a team. We see it everywhere, from football to athletics.
Right, but I doubt GB changes their auto-qualification standard by much. Which then defaults to discretion, which then defaults to always someone getting screwed over. So unless you make it a true olympic qualifier race, where the top X make the team (other olympic sports do it this way), then your sorta setting yourself up for this type of drama every time.
How hard is it to have a final criteria as a tiebreaker? e.g. points in WTCS ranking or national ranking or anything that is vaguely suitable. Discretion given to a bunch of politicians is always gonna be the problem.
Probaly pretty damn hard, because deciding what the “final criteria” is the whole reason why you do discretion. IE- who gets to decide what the “tiebreaker” is?
the criteria gets chosen by a board. everything documented, above board, people can appeal but once the document and details are final (well in advance of the selection time) that’s it. No space for discrtion.
Right but no federation is ever going to create a tiebreaker criteria, that’s why so many olympic decision documents have so many variables as part of the “discretion”. No federation will ever tie themselves to a final “tiebreaker”, even if they should. So when you ask how hard is it to do that…bloody fucking hard.
And you have to add in that now the MTR is part of the process, there is all kinds of decisions that have to be factored in. So when you say they should have a final tiebreaker- my question is, who/how is that “final tiebreaker” decided on?
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Best performance on a sprint/super sprint triathlon, for example.
And I’ll argue what about a domestique? How does that fit into the decision making, if it’s allowed. So again all I’m telling you is “real world” there is never going to be a final tiebreaker that they put on paper (that gets vetted/votted/decided on as the olympic process well prior to the actual decision making time) to then be 100% bound too. ZERO federations are going to do that. Discretion by default basically means it’s a choice and not an “automatic” decision (that your trying to add to discretion, which I understand).
What your basically arguing for is to essentially do what many other olympic sports do with a “trials” and top X make the team, regardless of upsets, etc. ITU doesn’t really do that with individual federation races since race dynamics matter so much in our sport, but they could if they wanted pick a race (many federations use the Test event as their 1st AQ qualifier these days) or the World Championship, or a spring WTCS event, etc and top 3 make it, and if your the best ranked athlete and finish 4th, so be it. That’s sport, upsets happen all the time. That would be what you should be wanting, because the “discretion” part is never not going to be a shit show for someone left out. Federations will never have a specific checklist with their discretion pick, if it did, that would solve it. But they won’t ever allow themselves to be bound by that “easy” of a process.
It wouldn’t be an Olympic cycle without appeals for GB-Tri. Been getting wrong since London and some would argue before then.
There was clear criteria. I am not a fan of GB-Tri but the only people who met automatic selection criteria was Beth and Alex. It was crazy hard but they did it. That was why they were confirmed months earlier.
Although the other places were discretionary, there was a policy that said how that discretion was to be measured.
The problem with the Sophie/Katie farce was that not only did they breach their selection policy but there was also bias against Sophie. She appealed to arbitration and she won. They then selected Katie again despite the court of arbitration saying that it should have been Sophie as per their policy.
I am not sure how common knowledge this is but the panel for discretionary selections consisted of 3 people. One of them was Katies coach or ex-coach can’t remember which one.
I’ll use USAT’s criteria, there’s nothing clear about it if you don’t AQ. They list a range of races from MTR to WTCS that will factor in and then they add in a half dozen variables. They don’t list which race is more important than others other than timeline of which races they will factor in, etc, and they dont list which variables are more important than other variables. They essentially have it written so they can decide who they want and it basically not be bound by any specific critieria. That’s generally been imo how most federations behave.
Generally most athletes who don’t get picked, “appeal” almost automatically from my experience (it doesn’t always go public) atleast a bunch in the US have in the past. Generally if they don’t announce it on the “announcement date” that is what is going on behind the scenes…rarely appeals are won, it sounds like in GB’s case, Sophie won it (and likely delayed the announcment).