UKA selection standards for the world champs

[philipo]

I have often railed against the one off qualifying performance nature of qualifying with the required standard which ., many .moons ago , was twice in the qual period.
I am glad to see the largest possible team philosophy is being challenged by discussion.

[philipo]

I dont buy the restraint of trade point at all. (typical lawyer stuff)The only restraint is not being good enough to meet imposed standards Who imposes those standards is of course a matter for debate.

WA does not pay .money to certain British athletes but
lottery ticket buyers do.

[Sovietvest]

I'm not talking about lottery funding - which I have no issue with being allocated at the discretion of a governing body. I'm talking about the main source of income for most athletes: contracts with kit manufacturers, other sponsorship deals, appearance money from meet promoters. If an athlete does not reach a global champs it will affect their kit deal bonus; their ability to sign future sponsorship deals and their chances of getting into meetings. I saw a tweet from Dai Green saying that failing to reach a global champs results in a reduction in kit sponsor earnings of 40-60%.

[Laps]

Lawyers will happily bleed a sport dry in pursuit of a principle. All you need is two sides to dig in. In this case it comes down to opinion about who should select the GB Athletics team and what is in it's long term best interests. You have the national governing body who are set up to administer and look after the interests of the sport in the UK and those favouring World Athletics whose main interest in this case is the efficiency of their competition and their opinion (rankings) about the best people to take part in it. Is it not ironic that some who wrote criticising the whole idea of WA rankings now want them used to partly select our national team.

Some may think the ngb will back down when challenged on this issue. I doubt it. It goes to the heart of who runs Athletics in the UK. It may also have implications as to the sports funding from UK Sport.

As for restraint of trade that applies to any selection process as philipo points out. Just claiming restraint of trade for UKA standing in the way of World Championship non-qualified invitees seems like taking the principle to ridiculous extremes. An Edge Hill University summary on the subject says this :-
"Traditionally, governing bodies have argued that restraints are justified, inter alia, with reference to the need to: promote competitive balance; incentivise youth development, encourage solidarity between participants; maintain the integrity, stability and proper functioning of competitions; protect national teams; and maintain the commercial viability of sport. The doctrine requires that restraints are reasonable not only in the interests of the parties imposing the rule, but also proportionate and in the wider public interest."

Any amount to sustain and defeat legal argument there.
If you think setting lawyers upon your sport is a good way to proceed to win the argument you are making a very bad mistake in my opinion.

[Sovietvest]

Lawyers will happily bleed a sport dry in pursuit of a principle. All you need is two sides to dig in. In this case it comes down to opinion about who should select the GB Athletics team and what is in it's long term best interests. You have the national governing body who are set up to administer and look after the interests of the sport in the UK and World Athletics whose main interest in this case is the efficiency of their competition and their opinion (rankings) about the best people to take part in it.

Some may think the ngb will back down when challenged on this issue. I doubt it. It goes to the heart of who runs Athletics in the UK.

If you think setting lawyers on your sport is the way to proceed you are making a very bad mistake in my opinion.

I understand your dislike of lawyers, Laps and particular in this context given that legal fees made British Athletics bankrupt after the Modahl affair. I'm not talking about athletes suing UKA for millions in lost earnings though. a small number of athletes would be affected and I'd assume the loss of earnings would run into the tens of thousands rather than millions - none of the athletes of the standard we are talking about are getting rich through this sport.

I'd hope however, that a crowd funded legal challenge - or better still - just a threat of one - would be enough to change the policy.

I personally do not think we can leave it to UKA to look after "the interests of the sport in the UK". Successive regimes have done a pretty poor job of that and I'd like fans and athletes to have much more of a say in how the sport is run.

Don't forget that pressure will come also from WA - this is undermining their World Rankings system. Even if UKA won't listen to fans and athletes, it will be hard for them to ignore WA.

[Laps]

Soviet
By coincidence I was editing my comments at the same time.

You think a difference of opinion should be settled by the threat of legal action. I heartily disagree.
You think that legal action once it kicks off won't take on a life of its own. Sadly the courts are full of cases where minor disputes turned into very expensive lessons.

[Sovietvest]

I'm not talking about a mere 'difference of opinion' between two equal parties. I'm talking about an unequal relationship where a decision by the more powerful party affects the livelihood of the second party.

Don't make assumptions about people. FWIW, I've had a career that has involved keeping lawyers out of work-related disputes. I am more than aware of the dangers of using lawyers and I certainly do not believe that a difference of opinion should be settled by a threat of legal action.

[Laps]

Not really. You are talking about a situation which affects everyone on a continual basis where people are elected or appointed to make decisions on our behalf.
The results of those decisions affect us all including our income. This is just another small example. The difference of opinion lies between UKA and those who favour WA's decisions. I would like to always chose the decisions I preferred.

There are some valid issues which if Buckner is good at his job he should want to debate and respond to. They must have had some importance in this decision making process and at Swimming. However trying to bully UKA with threats of legal action is not the way imo..

[Ladyloz]

Really interesting comments by Dai Greene on twitter. Basically saying how he only made the standard by a tenth for 2009 worlds. He ran well in the semi at worlds but by his own admission then underperformed in the final but how that taught him a lot and he doubts he would then have gone on to win Commonwealth; Euros and World golds without that experience.

Also talks about how difficult it can be for up and coming athletes to get into the right races to obtain standards.

(3) Dai Greene on Twitter: "1/ The @BritAthletics policy of only taking medalists and top 8 athletes is going to hinder not only an athletes development but also their chance to become full time athletes. I know that their policy standard (for a lot of events) is based on the IAAF standard." / Twitter

There is a very plausible scenario in Dai's own event where Alastair Chalmers sets a new PB of e.g. 48.75 but this is still 0.05 short of the standard but could easily be within the quota to receive a World Rankings invite. In this scenario he stays home and misses out on vital experience to aid his development and push him on further to run 48 low i.e. exactly the sort of time required to make global finals.

[marra]

Yeah, I was looking at last year's team and looking at some of the people who were in it. Alex Haydock Wilson came immediately to mind. Clearly no superstar of the sport. Wasn't even within 0.5s of the qualifying mark for the WC last year.

Got a ranking place last year though. Then ran well enough to smash his PB in Eugene and finish a creditable 10th in the SFs. Following that, got a bronze in the individual in Munich and anchored the 4x4 team to gold there.

Whilst his performance in Eugene was hardly world beating, it's not unreasonable to believe that the experience might have helped him in Munich. And neither is it unreasonable to imagine that, without that experience, said Munich performance might not have happened.

Had this current set up been in place last year, he wouldn't have made the Eugene team.

I understand the financial constraints and such like, as well as understanding some people who think we take too many 'passengers'. It's a tough problem to have. But I also worry about the development path for athletes like AHW under this kind of system.

And the point about athletes not getting into the events to get times/distances is a crucial one for me. As is also the fact that some athletes clearly are better at championship performances than others - we're currently all happy about Jasmin Sawyers, who is the epitome of that. Hell, going back to the 400m, Christine famously saved her best performances for champs.

But we're changing to a system that actively wants people to show their best at other times? Even if that might mean they aren't at top form for champs? Surely, if anything, it seems most likely to benefit those like Prescod who get the quick time somewhere but don't perform on the big day? Is that really what those in favour of this system would want?

As I said, I hope it works and I have egg all over my face. But it seems very questionable to me right now that it will.

[MysteryBrick]

I think the views of *actual athletes* who have existed, succeeded and indeed failed in this environment should be given a lot of credence...

[marra]

Just to get back on my soapbox on this issue for a second, we're just approaching the end of the British Swimming Championships and their selection policy has....not gone great.

To cut a long story short they have set the qualifying marks far too strictly this year, which has meant that they have had to change their policy halfway through the meet to loosen them enough to get the team that they would want/need to pick.

And it wasn't because the swimmers were under-performing, we're talking about literal world class swims that were missing the times; times that would have qualified swimmers for Olympic or World Championship finals in the last couple of years.

I appreciate that swimming is a different sport than athletics, but it should be a cautionary tale for the general principle of harder qualification encourages higher standards - if you don't get your standards very carefully right, you can easily end up with egg on your face.

[philipo]

The swimming quals disaster was foolishly making the standards even tougher than the A standard by Fina and better than the NR in the GB in certain events.
A lot of our swimmers have this year dropped off a bit from the last couple of years, apart from Peaty and Duncan Scott who is not the man of the OG Tokyo standard.
For sure, setting standards to incentivise athletes in any individual sport is mighty tricky.

[marra]

In fairness, the British standards are often higher than the Fina A standard. Which is fine, as we regularly have more swimmers who achieve the A standard than we have places we want to send. But the initial standards British Swimming set were absurd.

And the swimmers haven't really dropped off. By my calculation, 22 of the 34 events at the British Champs this year were won in a time quicker than last year, and that's with some of our stars off top form/not there.

The swimmers are doing everything right. It's the administrators who got it wrong this time.

[philipo]

In fairness, the British standards are often higher than the Fina A standard. Which is fine, as we regularly have more swimmers who achieve the A standard than we have places we want to send. But the initial standards British Swimming set were absurd.

And the swimmers haven't really dropped off. By my calculation, 22 of the 34 events at the British Champs this year were won in a time quicker than last year, and that's with some of our stars off top form/not there.

The swimmers are doing everything right. It's the administrators who got it wrong this time.

Wt blazes does the usual stuff from marra mean, by the phrase" the swimmers are doing everything right. " . How many swimmers do you train with in the north, south and west, in and out of the pool and completely know the full details of their training. You dont.
The A standard was not met by a great number of our swimmers and your useless misleading stat about winners being quicker than a previous year when it's the standard of performances in the heats and then the 8 finalists that matter.
Fortunately there is young talent coming along but we will see progression or otherwise in the next year or so.
There are a large number of events in the WC over 50m and a number of strokes in which we have little to offer.
Apologies for talking swimming.

[marra]

Wt blazes does the usual stuff from marra mean, by the phrase" the swimmers are doing everything right. " . How many swimmers do you train with in the north, south and west, in and out of the pool and completely know the full details of their training. You dont.
The A standard was not met by a great number of our swimmers and your useless misleading stat about winners being quicker than a previous year when it's the standard of performances in the heats and then the 8 finalists that matter.
Fortunately there is young talent coming along but we will see progression or otherwise in the next year or so.
There are a large number of events in the WC over 50m and a number of strokes in which we have little to offer.
Apologies for talking swimming.

Actually we had 33 swimmers who performed better than the Fina A standard for the WC at the British Champs. I know this because I literally went through the figures before I offered my views.

If you consider that British Swimming have set a cap of 30 swimmers at the WC, we had more people put in a time than we have places.

The only events at the WC that we didn't have someone set a Fina A standard in at these British Champs were the following - 400m Free, 100m Breast, 200m Fly, 400m IM. All on the men's side. Every other event had at least one Fina A standard in the final. Some had several.

My point about the times was to show that even in the absence of Peaty and with Duncan Scott being off colour, our swimmers still tended to be posting world class times that met the FINA standard.

Your view that "a lot of our swimmers have dropped off apart from Peaty and Scott" is just factually inaccurate.

So THAT'S what I mean when I say the swimmers are doing everything right. What they are doing in their training is irrelevant. They met the FINA standards here in spades.

The only problem was the absurd British standards. And the reason it was relevant to an athletics discussion is to try and ward off the same problem there, where standards could be set unreasonably high, especially when the person in charge of setting them moved from swimming to do so and is praising the swimming model!

[philipo]

Dawson,Greenbank, Renshaw to name but 3 that have not impressed and are slower than the last couple of years. There are others.

[marra]

Dawson,Greenbank, Renshaw to name but 3 that have not impressed and are slower than the last couple of years. There are others.

Sigh.

That would be Molly Renshaw, who retired in November? Are you really meaning her in the list of people who didn't perform well at this week's champs?

And yes, Greenbank and Dawson weren't at their respective best this week. But it's first worth noting that both still put in a FINA A time for one event - Dawson in the 100m back, Greenbank in the 200m back.

Dawson has been injured for much of the last 2 years. Even still, her time in the 100m back was a half second quicker this year than last. Whilst not close to her best, it's still clear progress. More importantly, she was 3rd. There were 2 other swimmers who also put down FINA times!

Greenbank definitely seemed off colour, but was again beaten by 2 other people who made the FINA time.



So you've named 3 people, 1 who wasn't there and 2 others who, whilst off form, were not even the best in their event, with some mitigating factors.

That's a fair way away from your initial position that "a lot of our swimmers have this year dropped off from the last couple of years", surely?

And that's not even going into the swimmers who have stepped up. The facts just don't lie. Whilst one or two of our swimmers might not be on form, the collective is absolutely quicker than it was last year.

[MysteryBrick]

Marra, your mistake has been to try to discuss using facts.

[PotterHoppo96]

I understand partially where they're coming from but I believe if an event has a field size of 32 than invited British athletics in said 32 should be allowed to go. We're not cheating by taking athletes who are maybe ranked 37th in the world. Most other sports have competitiors far lower than that taking part.

I imagine finances plays a massive part