How to Select an Olympic team

Unlike many other countries, and many other sports within this country, U.S. track and field selects its Olympians through trials and a fair, but occasionally cruel calculus: finish in the top three in your event or stay home.

There are legitimate criticisms of this selection process (I'll discuss a few of them in a moment), but it is probably the most objective process possible. And the athletes themselves don't seem to be lobbying for anything different. So what's the problem?

I ran across this particularly dumb answer to that question while searching for rsults on Yahoo's sports site: USA Track and Field Disqualifies Itself. The author, Roy Johnson, compares the trials selection process to the way U.S. gymnastics selects their team, and comes down in favor of gymnastics.

To me, his arguments are far unconvincing -- he points to Tyson Gay, Jeremy Wariner, and Allyson Felix, and says that everyone knows they should be on the team, so why should they have to prove themselves again in the trials? He asks why we should take the risk of denying a better athlete a spot because that athlete wakes up with a cold on race day, or slips, or has some other bit of bad luck?

So how do we know who is the better athlete without having them race in a big event, with all the risks and pressure that goes along with it? Does he think we should use time trials to determine the best athletes? Records? Results from earlier competition against lesser rivals? Johnson doesn't say, and that's why his column is so vapid.

However, there IS an argument against the American system and that is that because it allows for no exceptions to the top three rule, almost all athletes MUST plan their training to be at their best for the trials. One could argue that for some events this works against having athletes in the best shape for the Olympics themselves.

For this to work, you'd really want the exemption to come from the IOC itself, and be an exemption to the three athletes per country rule. In other words, the IOC could allow four entries from one country on the condition that the four included the defending world champion and three others who had met the qualifying standard. This would allow the U.S. to have its trials, select its top three, and still make a place for a Wariner or Lagat or Gay.

One risk would be that defending world champions skip the trials entirely, but the U.S. body could still require participation in the trials as a condition of selection, even for "exempt" athletes.

Anyway, I note that this morning's Boston Globe has a story on the same subject of the qualifying process (US Olympic trials qualify as stressful). The example cited is Dan O'Brien, a heavy favorite for a medal in the decathlon in Barcelona (1992), who failed to clear a height in the pole vault and did not make the team.

In the end, I don't think anything will change with the U.S. system -- mostly because the athletes themselves seem to accept it, stress and all. Ultimately, almost all athletes seem to prefer the process to be fair, and DON'T want the process to be in the hands a selection committee.