Big lesson for you today:
A)Life is not 100% fair
B)Life is not 100% perfect
If you need 100% of both of those I suggest you create a fanasy world inside your head and live there.
It's called meet management, NOT meet perfection. By managing the number one goal is to make the best decisions possible under the given circumstances. Half of these guys have not raced the distances that they are going into yet this season, so you use judgement to place them in the correct race and part of that judgement is trusting the athletes coaches judgement of where those athletes are at. Is it perfect? Nope. Is it the best way to do it (meaning that they highest percentage of athletes are in the right heats)? Yep.
Do you think Bekele gets eliminated from a 3K this summer in europe because he has only run a 12:54 5K opener and no 3K's but the rest of the field has marks under 7:42 already? You know the answer to that and it's the same logic here.