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While the television coverage of the men’s Olympic road race was positively abysmal (thank goodness for Eurosport, I at least could listen to live radio coverage of the men’s event), the women had the good fortune of having their entire race play out live Sunday morning on the USA network. And in a truly stunning finish, I do believe I witnessed Judith Arndt deliberately roll over and give the gold to Sara Carrigan. Wow. Evidently, Arndt was more than a little miffed that her compatriot Petra Rossner was left off the German Olympic team and made her feelings plain as day for the world to see by towing Carrigan to gold and then flipping off the German federation to cap off her mind-boggling protest. Chosing an Olympic team seems to be a particularly prickly affair: on one extreme politics can rear its ugly head if the selection is left solely up to the coaches (i.e. German women, Lithuanian women) and on the other end of the spectrum, having explicit formulas for selection largely designed to keep politics out of the selection can result in a team of GC riders and an outclassed D3 pro duking it out in a one-day classic atmosphere (i.e. USA men). Fred Rodriguez, who I think would have had the best chance for an American medal, had a very lucid analysis of our selection process and its shortcomings. At one time the US had a more coaching-centric selection process and the result was frequently pure calamity and blatant partisan bias. Read all about it in the highly recommended Dave Prouty book In Spite of Us to see how things played out in the mid-1980s. |
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