Ranking points are quietly replacing the national trial

Qualifying by a year of accumulated results is fairer on paper and it is taking something real away from the sport.

A national trial is brutal and stupid and I would keep it. One day, one race, top three go. No appeal for the world number two who had a fever on the Saturday. It is the least accurate selection method available and it produces the best afternoons in the sport.

Athletics and swimming have been drifting the other way for years. Entry standards plus world ranking points, computed from a rolling window of results weighted by meeting tier and finishing position, so that a place at the Games is earned across a season rather than in a single heat. The logic is unarguable. A season is a bigger sample. One bad day should not erase two years of consistency, and a system built on samples of one will occasionally leave a genuine medal contender at home.

But look at what the ranking model quietly rewards. It rewards access. Points come from tiered meetings, and the high-tier meetings are in Europe and North America, and getting into them requires an agent, a visa, and a federation that can buy flights. An athlete in a country with no circuit races the same times and cannot buy the same points. The ranking system does not measure who is fastest. It measures who is fastest and can afford to prove it eleven times.

It also changes behaviour in a way that flattens the season. If your place depends on a rolling average, you stop risking anything. You avoid the fields that might expose you, you chase the meeting where the points-per-place ratio is friendliest, and you race a schedule optimised by a spreadsheet. Trials produce the opposite behaviour: everybody has to be in the same place on the same day and one of them has to lose.

There is a middle path and one country already runs it, more or less by accident. Hold the trial. Make it the primary route. Then hold back one discretionary place per event for the athlete whose season says something the trial did not, and require the selectors to publish their reasoning.

Sport is not an estimation problem. If it were, we would simulate the final and hand out the medals by Monday.

Somebody has to be in the third lane on a wet Tuesday with a place at stake, and either take it or not.