Athletics SA dazes athletics with Rio Olympics limits draft
The brains trust at Athletics SA is so clairvoyant that it predicted all 17 changes made to Olympic qualifying criteria months before they happened. Well, that's if you believe the federation about its controversial draft document that surfaced a week or so ago.The proposed qualifying criteria in the document contradicted those signed off by ASA and the SA Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee in July.The draft criteria were far tougher, and they understandably caused consternation.For one, the document slashed the qualifying window period by several months, eliminating all performances from last year, which would have forced 13 track and field athletes, including 400m world champion Wayde van Niekerk, to qualify again this year.The document also added ultra-tough A qualifying standards and relegated the official criteria to B, which it stated would not guarantee selection.But ASA president Aleck Skhosana and board member Pieter Lourens at the weekend dismissed the document, saying it was drafted early last year."It was a working document," Skhosana said after the federation had met elite athletes and coaches near OR Tambo Airport on Saturday afternoon."It was well before the agreement. We put that aside."But amazingly, the B qualifying standards in the document featured all 17 of the revised qualifying standards announced only in November by the world governing body, the IAAF.Not only did ASA correctly pick the right 17 of 43 Olympic events that would be altered several months later, they also forecast, to the hundredth of a second, the revised qualifying times for 11 races and, to the exact centimetre, the updated qualifying distances for three jump and three throw events.The IAAF eased the criteria for the 17 events - nine men's and eight women's - less than three months ago.ASA's A-qualifying standards, by and large, matched the 10th best efforts in each discipline in the world for 2015.ASA's assertion that the document was old was not aided by claims by at least two delegates at the meeting that two pages were missing from the booklets handed out on Saturday.Another source said Sascoc high-performance manager Ezera Tshabangu made it clear to delegates that ASA already had an agreed selection policy in place with Sascoc "and she can't see how we can change that moving forward".One athlete remarked after the meeting: "I'm even more confused now than I was before."..
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