this is kind of fascinating to me because i remember going to the national conventions back in the day and voting on some of these issues (not to mention sitting in the back of some the less exciting meetings with a world record holding hurdler and a couple of brown bags hiding st. ides premium malt liquor, but i digress). does that still happen now?
a couple of quick points: one, we're not talking exclusively about an international meet, so why do international qualifications and resumes matter? as flanagan, rogers and rupp showed tonight, this is STILL a national championships, not just a qualifier. two, if i understand fam's argument, it's more about the lack of transparency, fairness, and plain good manners, not just about his deserving to run, and therefore a cause worth fighting for in my opinion.
i suppose, and this is off the top of my head, that any qualifying/championship process is trying to blend at least these five things: fairness, equality, objectivity, pragmatism, and effectiveness. fairness allows at least for altitude conversions for qualifying; equality is the "a" standard; objectivity is choosing the top three (in general) for the team; pragmatism says it would be unrealistic to run the final 7 different times (like the nba/nhl/mlb) to see whom the best REALLY might be; and effectiveness--are we really getting the best qualifiers for both the trials and the olympic team?--is an ever-changing recipe of the above. while choosing the top three places for the team may be the most objective, in fact it may not be the most fair or most effective (e.g. someone falls in front of the best hurdler, or even if your best shot at a medal gets sick at an inopportune time). march madness, strangely enough, is not very fair, equal, objective, and probably not even very effective in choosing a national champion, but it sure is fun, and reasonably pragmatic given the constraints of a collegiate season. it seems to me, the larger the numbers, the more you have to weigh towards equality and objectivity--it becomes too difficult to be fair to everyone, and pragmatism is a slippery word at best (in the interest of pragmatism, i probably could have chosen, with a high degree of effectiveness and some objectivity, our national team on the men's side for the 10k tonight without needing to run the race, but that would not have been very equal and even less fair). certainly usatf has shown an ability to use some of the flexibility allowed in the name of fairness to treat some athletes “more equally” than others, such as the current situation, and abused pragmatism with the fiasco last year with leaving 800m “b” qualifiers out of empty lanes. bottom line in my opinion: in the name of equality and objectivity, go back to just an “a” standard. it’s reasonably pragmatic and fair, and definitely equal and objective, thereby eliminating politics, usatf incompetence, shoe companies and agents from the equation, and reasonably effective (outside of dan o’brien, can anyone think of a legitimate medal contender that somehow failed to make the team under the old “a” standard system?).
that’s my long story and i’m sticking to it…