By Kyle Merber
April 15, 2026
DISCLAIMER: These ideas are malleable, open to debate, and far from a hill we are willing to die on. It’s a conversation starter!
Championship racing is fun because anything can happen in a tactical race. Championship racing can also be a difficult way to select a team…. because anything can happen in a tactical race.
At the Australian National Championships, the downsides of a tactical race were on full display as jostling turned to chaos with less than 100m left in a crowded, slow race. Defending champ Jess Hull had a clear line of sight to the finish, but with a small pack still there beside her, Claudia Hollingsworth was full of energy but trapped. That’s when Hull got clipped from behind and went down.
The 21-year-old Hollingsworth closed in a remarkable 56.8 seconds over the final lap and crossed the finish line in 4:17.06 but with a looming sense of worry about what the judges would say. Well, she was DQ’d… initially. Sarah Billings was then determined to be the winner and with it, automatic selection for this summer’s Commonwealth Games. The second (and possibly third) spot would come via discretionary selection. All bets were on the many-time global medalist, Jess Hull, receiving a selection.
From an Athletics Australia perspective, that slow of a race, the fall, and subsequent DQ were not what you wanted. The purpose of having trials is so your best athletes can fairly duke it out to see who has the best shot of earning medals. That didn’t happen here.
It turns out that didn’t necessarily matter, either. Hollingsworth’s disqualification was overturned the next day. In general, we’re ticket-carrying riders on the Hollingsworth hype train, but that isn’t necessarily a decision we agree with at face value: her cut-in was a fairly obvious obstruction that impacted another athlete’s race. Rightly or not, Hollingsworth is now going to the Commonwealth Games through that automatically selected spot.
Beyond feeling bad for Sarah Billings—who for 24 hours thought she was on the team—it’s worth reflecting on the validity of a system where the actual original outcome was clearly so far from what the hoped for outcome was. Are trials races really the best way to determine team selection?
World Athletics is the governing body that, in addition to hosting the World Championships, oversees events and regulations surrounding qualification for the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games. The International Olympic Committee and Commonwealth Games Federation are also independent entities, so it’s slightly more complicated in this instance. But for the sake of this argument, let’s just keep it clean and pretend we are discussing sending a team to the 2027 World Athletics Championships.
As things stand today, World Athletics sets the standards and manages the world rankings system that is leveraged for athlete qualification. The limitation to the ranking system is that even if an athlete has reached a certain standard, it’s still up to the federation to select them for its team. And there are 214 member federations with their own unique ways of deciding who gets those coveted spots for Worlds.
For the most competitive countries—where there are usually more than three athletes capable of hitting the standard— the national championships are a really big deal. If you don’t show up on that day, often six weeks ahead of the meet you’re hoping to qualify for, then you don’t go.
The whole system depends on a very basic assumption: that federations should get to set their own rules for who wears the national colors each year. But if World Athletics is in charge of the event and determining who qualifies, why is the team selection outsourced to the federations?
You could, for the sake of argument, view national governing bodies’ role in the process as more of a middleman with a frustrating tendency toward inconsistency. Rather than Team GB holding out developing athletes, shouldn’t it be up to World Athletics to say who’s invited? Instead of Kenya not announcing the Trials location until a couple weeks before, World Athletics would simply give the Kenyan federation a list of accepted names. In lieu of Australia hosting qualifying meets five months in advance, World Athletics could save them the trouble.
Rather than leave everything up to Seb Coe sitting alone in a room with a whiteboard and a telephone, WA could simply double- or triple-down on its touted world rankings system.
The top three ranked eligible athletes from each country are selected. Hard stop.
In that system, athletes don’t have to worry about chasing standards at all. It further deepens the investment in a system that is currently being pushed hard, but not always acknowledged. If fans understand and become invested in the ranking system, if athletes are racing more often, if Diamond League and area races are prioritized over college meets, then the system is working as World Athletics designed it.
Certainly, some logical changes would have to occur. Firstly, national championships should be upgraded from category “B” stature to make them more valuable. World Athletics could mandate that an athlete must compete in their respective event at their national championship, but the finishing result would be more about ranking than qualification. Such a system would, however, open the door to even more gatekeeping by a small handful of WA officials, meet directors, and agents. The Diamond League in particular would need much more transparency around field selection.
And finally, the performance window for the world rankings should open on January 1st of that year. The current system creates a loophole where global championship results can “carry forward” and allow superstars to skip out on much-needed regular season appearances.
Every NFL team understands what needs to happen to play in the Super Bowl; each division doesn’t set its own playoff rules. Similarly, track and field could benefit from a lot more international consistency about “the rules” – and whether or not you think World Athletics should hold all the power, they have the ability to create a system that’s more streamlined for global championships to come.
Kyle Merber
After hanging up his spikes – but never his running shoes – Kyle pivoted to the media side of things, where he shares his enthusiasm, insights, and experiences with subscribers of The Lap Count newsletter, as well as viewers of CITIUS MAG live shows.
