welcome to the forum, mandy. for those of you who don’t know, the previous board had as the three elite board members mandy pagon, eric schwartz (who wrote the anti-locke article on his duathlon.com site) and eric bean (of team girand).
you make some points, mandy, and they’re certainly worth answering.
MANDY: I think you have made it pretty clear that you would have no problem putting Steve back into the ED driver’s seat.
DAN: on the front page of slowtwitch there is a prominent link to what is my only article on this or any other site explaining my platform. on it i write, under ‘the case for a vote against me,’ that, ‘if you believe our former executive direct, Steve Locke, should be automatically reinstated as executive director by the new board, best not to vote for me.’
this is why i differentiate between steve the board member and steve the E.D. there are a variety of times i’ve locked horns with steve, one of which is over the federation’s posture toward endemic industry. when i was your primary sponsor, mandy, steve and i were locked in a variety of bitter struggles (no pun intended). likewise when i produced and financially backed a pair of “road to sydney” races and stepped in to finance and produce your pro national championships when no other RD would. during all these and other battles steve and i were pretty much consistently at odds with each other, including when i essentially took the federation’s RD congress and made it my own because USAT kept putting on 3rd rate conventions. and on and on. you ought to remember all this because you were there, in san diego, often in my factory and in my office, when all this was going on.
so if you’re looking for the board candidate that is bound and determined to put steve back in the E.D.'s chair, you’ve got to look somewhere else. that doesn’t mean, however, that i don’t believe he’d be a very valuable board member (one of eleven).
MANDY: But the real thing that finally got me to post is when you say that the USOC will take away all of the elite’s funding if Val and/or Jim are elected. That is just a lie.
DAN: you and i had a variety of conversations in january, prior to the elites voting as a group to turn down the protest asking for new elections, against jonathon grinder’s legal opinion. during those conversations i told you exactly what would happen. not what ought to happen, nor what was righteous, or true, or bitchin. what i told you would happen did happen. i didn’t make it happen. but it happened just the same, in precisely the way i said it would.
here we are again. there’s the way life oughta be, and the way life is. the way life oughta be is for val gattis to be doling out blessings to pros and AGers from 12 feet off the ground like glinda good witch of the north. but, then, there’s the way it is. perhaps you’re right. perhaps it was a kangaroo-court BRP. listen: i don’t disagree with you. that’s not the issue. if the USOC decides not to give you any money, you’re going to call it corrupt and unfair. however, that’s not the issue. i’m not writing that they shouldn’t give you money. i’m writing that there’s a very real danger they won’t.
once i had a friend of mine get fired from a life insurance company. he was shocked, because he put in 10 or 12 hours a day. “but how many policies did you sell?” i asked him. it just doesn’t matter what’s right or fair. it doesn’t matter how hard you work. it may not even matter how many medals you win. what matters is, will the USOC say yes to the elite funding grant requests when USAT puts back into power the very people the USOC threw out?