Why the Olympics team selection process is often messy

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There will be tears.

At the culmination of any messy, imperfect, yearlong team selection process for an American Olympic or world championship team, that is our only guarantee. Athletic dreams hang in the balance, so there will be tears.

There were tears in 2008, before Beijing. There were tears before Richmond worlds in 2015, and there have been tears before Rio — both happy tears and sad tears, trickling down faces as final rosters hit the news.

Bike racing produces one winner and a bunch of losers. But in the race to make the team, there is no finish line. Instead, it’s often a judged event, similar to gymnastics. But even with clear-cut team selection criteria, human judgment is always subjective and often flawed. There is rarely a single, right answer.

ANY DISCUSSION OF USA Cycling’s selection process eventually zeroes in on Jim Miller, the governing body’s vice president of athletics. He’s the kingmaker, some say. A brilliant coach, according to others. He’s “a man to stay on good terms with if you want a shot at the team,” says one athlete. “All roads lead to Jim,” says another.

A former national coach, Miller oversaw USAC’s women’s program for most of the 2000s. He has strong ties to BMC Racing and personally helped develop Tejay van Garderen. To top it off, Miller is also the longtime personal coach of two-time Olympic gold medalist Kristin Armstrong.

There is no question that Miller holds great power within USAC’s selection system. He’s not on the selection committee — that’s a group of nine former pro riders who make the final team selection — but he does steer it, directly and indirectly. He schedules conference calls, organizes meetings, and lays out the grand plan. He determines the tactical requirements for each squad. He also provides data sets, everything from power numbers to results tables, for the committee to analyze. The committee listens to his racing narrative, and uses his information in choosing athletes.

“Jim’s got the big picture across all the athletes and all the disciplines,” says Timmy Duggan, who rode in the London Games and is a member of the current selection committee. “So on any given call, when we’re looking at the files and deciding on the squad, we have Jim presenting the big picture and what we need to decide on that day.”

This is true of all the American squads except one: Miller and USA Cycling are both adamant that he plays little more than a support role in the selection of the women’s team, due to his conflict of interest with Armstrong.

The committee makes its selection based on what Miller and the coaches have put before them. Guiding them is USA Cycling’s published selection criteria.

“It would be great if we had a data set for assists, like in basketball, but we don’t.”– Timmy Duggan

Those criteria are mainly built on four pillars. Medal capability is first and foremost. Enhancing team performance is the second pillar — that’s the “good domestique” clause. The third is future prospects, which requires that the selection committee consider an athlete’s trajectory within the sport: A rising star should be added to the team, even if he or she is not yet a winner. The fourth pillar is simply UCI ranking: A top-ranked athlete shall be selected based on that merit.

There is also a fifth pillar, which lays out the importance of international competition. Recently, it’s been the source of most of the post-selection conflict.

IN THE FINAL DAYS before the 2015 UCI world championships in Richmond, Virginia, Lauren Komanski’s lawyers squared off against USA Cycling. Komanski had not been selected for the road race team at the first home-soil world championship in 30 years. Allie Dragoo, a young upstart, was selected instead.

It was hardly a black-and-white decision. For the future of American cycling, picking Dragoo, just 26, was the right call. But Komanski, 30, had more international experience. It was one pillar of USAC’s selection criteria against another, with no definitive answer.

Like clockwork, polemics spring up prior to almost every Olympics and many world championships. The selection committee faces a multiple-choice test with more than one right answer. They must do so based on selection criteria that are often contradictory. Each rider, each answer, can be appealed — the appeals process involves third-party arbitration— if they disagree.

The Komanski/Dragoo case was an illustration of the fundamental conflict between the subjective nature of team selection and the rigid criteria by which that selection must abide. “It would be great if we had a data set for assists, like in basketball,” Duggan says. “But we don’t. So there are always going to be questions.” And when there are multiple correct answers, someone will always think the one selected is wrong.

Across most of the world, that’s just fine. In Belgium, Italy, France, coaches make a decision and it’s final. Their selection process may be political and contentious, but there is closure. Not so in the United States. Here, athletes have the right to appeal.

Thanks to the Ted Stevens Amateur Sports Act, first enacted by Jimmy Carter in 1978 and then updated 20 years later, there is a legal foundation for the selection of athletes for the Olympics. Section 9 of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s bylaws provides legal recourse to athletes who believe they have been unjustly left off the team.

The law allows any individual athlete who feels he or she has not been provided with the opportunity to participate — in other words, hasn’t been adequately considered for a team slot — to file a formal, legal petition with the governing body.

It was under the Ted …

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