The biggest news out of the first part of the Olympic Trials may not have been who made the team. It was who didn’t, and why.

First, pole vault American record holder KC Lightfoot failed to advance to the final with an uncharacteristically shaky performance in the qualifying round on Friday. Two days later, 2022 World hammer throw champion Brooke Andersen fouled out of the Trials final. On Monday, reigning World discus champion Lagi Tausaga-Collins didn’t even make it out of her qualifying round with three fouls as well. And then, most dramatically, Monday evening ended with the fall heard ‘round the world as reigning Olympic champion Athing Mu got tripped up in the first lap of the 800m final and couldn’t close the gap on the field in time. Proven championship performers and big-name talents are going to be watching Paris from home thanks to USATF’s perform-on-the-day Trials selection policy.

American track and field acolytes may not realize that, like our stubborn insistence on measuring everything in feet and inches, our top-three system is pretty unusual compared with the rest of the world. Many other countries set their teams with a mix of Trials competitions and provisional selections by their federation’s selection committees. Jamaica, for example, allows for a complicated exemption process that allows them to possibly send double Olympic champ Elaine Thompson-Herah to her third Olympic Games despite the fact that she’s battled injuries all season and has a 100m season’s best nearly a full second off her PB.

If your goal is to field the team with the highest upside, leaving yourself a little wiggle room is a huge asset. But if your goal is to prioritize fairness and limit subjectivity, discretionary spots can be a huge liability. Notoriously, both Athletics Kenya and the Ethiopian Athletics Federation decisions about teams can be intensely political and subject to internal machinations, with balancing of considerations like training group, brand affiliation, and agent influence against performance and potential. It’s not hard to envision the conflicts of interest that abound in a world where the USATF adopts a subjective selection process amidst its multi-decade sponsorship agreement with Nike, for example.

But still, every couple of years there’s a compelling enough omission that complaints about the status quo start to arise. This week, it was Athing Mu, but what about established marathoners like Keira D’Amato or Galen Rupp having one bad day in Orlando? Does 3x global medalist Emma Coburn deserve a spot if she can get back from her ill-timed ankle injury in time? The what-ifs only get louder and more insistent when, inevitably, someone like Mu rips a 1:53 at some random meet in August.

Even when accounting for the randomness of circumstances, it’s worth noting that our Olympic Trials is specifically designed to mimic – to the greatest extent possible – the Olympic Games themselves. Few other countries spend 10 days selecting their teams, but the benefit we get is that we know that the athletes we sent have demonstrated the ability to perform in championship settings, without rabbits, over the same number of rounds as the championship they’re qualifying for. And for every big star who gets knocked out, you get pleasant surprises like Molly Seidel in 2021 and Clayton Murphy in 2016, who overperform at Trials and then do it again at the Olympics.

Winston Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others.” The American Trials system may be harsh, inelegant, and at times arbitrary, but it’s the best of all our bad options when it comes to picking Team USA.

For more of the top stories and analysis from the biggest stories in track and field from the past week, subscribe to The Lap Count newsletter for free. New edition every Wednesday morning at 6:30 a.m. ET.