KEY POINTS:
This week's New Zealand Olympic Committee general assembly will feature a forum on selection criteria that secretary-general Barry Maister expects to throw up a wide range of differing opinions on the basis for selection to Olympic and Commonwealth games teams.
He will take with him some unsolicited advice
from 1966 Empire Games gold medal winner Roy Williams.
He believes the Olympic selectors have made a "mockery" of themselves ahead of Beijing and that the selection of some and, in particular, the women's soccer team, "has belittled the Olympic movement".
It is stirring, provocative rhetoric from a pain who understands acutely how cruel the Olympic cut can be.
Three times - in 1956, 1960 and 1964 - Williams bettered the qualifying mark for the decathlon. Twice, before Melbourne and Tokyo, he was nominated by the then New Zealand Athletics Association, only to be excluded by the NZOC.
His Tokyo exclusion was even debated by the Government of the day, and when he won gold in Kingston, Jamaica, two years later, he freely admitted his primary motivation was to "stick it up the selectors".
So when Williams, brother of Helsinki long jump gold medallist Yvette, talks about the inherent inconsistency in the selection for the squad to Beijing, only the foolish would choose to ignore him.
"On the one hand you have Rowing New Zealand setting very high standards - basically if they don't think you'll make the final you're not going - and then you have the soccer teams going. It makes a mockery of the selectors," Williams said.
Last week's Olympic coverage centred around the omission of marathoners Liza Hunter-Galvan and Michael Aish. The former has said she will appeal the decision while Aish has received plenty of support from the athletics community.
Williams is unmoved, saying their records at major championships were poor and there was nothing to indicate that would change. He just wished the NZOC applied the same tough criteria to underperforming, or non-performing, team sports who he believes have absolutely no right to line up in Beijing alongside the athletes, like the rowers and cyclists, for example, who have done the hard yards to get there.
"[Their presence] belittles the Olympic movement," Williams said in disgust.
Williams is at one end of the spectrum. There will be others at the forum who believe the NZOC should broaden their criteria so the country is always represented in truly global sports such as gymnastics, badminton and table tennis, even if there is no chance of a top 16 finish, which the NZOC dictates should be a minimum requirement.
At the moment the selectors - Barry Maister, Mike Stanley and Simon Wickham - are performing a quadrennial balancing act that is transparent, yet impossible to find universal popularity.
"We are not sitting here smugly saying we have got everything right," says Maister. Hence the forum.
"Like every Olympic team there are open-and-shut cases and some that are contentious."
Before Athens in 2004 it was the inclusion of the women's basketball team that caused so much angst, leading to the resignation of the long-standing and hugely respected selector Bruce Cameron.
This year it is the inclusion of the soccer teams, in particular the women's soccer team.
"Clearly they did not meet the criteria," Maister said, "although they had met the Fifa qualification standard by virtue of beating Papua New Guinea.
They were referred to the NZOC board who, under the guise of using them as role models to get more young girls into soccer, okayed their inclusion.
Williams, like many others from within sport, believes the board was leaned on by Fifa and that teams sports get it so much easier than individuals when it comes to qualifying standards.
Maister rejects that in part, pointing out the extensive and cut-throat qualification tournaments the hockey teams went through to qualify. (Incidentally, if there is one team that has seriously under-performed in the past year it is the women's hockey team who have lost 26 and drawn two of their past 35 tests.)
"There are anomalies in Oceania," admits Maister, "in basketball and soccer if Australia has already qualified."
With Australia's defection to Asia for soccer, qualification for the Olympics was a given.
"With the Tall Ferns, we said beating Fiji was not enough. We wanted evidence they were capable of beating tougher opposition."
Timely then, that the Tall Ferns chose last week to notch their first-ever win against Australia.
Of course, the NSOs can make life a bit easier for the selectors, as Maister acknowledged when announcing the rowing team, by applying strict criteria themselves. He is clearly appreciative of the tough line that rowing and sailing took. Athletics appears to have largely fallen in step with them.
But it does not work for every sport, and nor should it necessarily, though these ideals will be vigorously debated this week.
The element of subjectiveness, or as Maister puts it, "discretion", will likely remain. "If not then there would be no need for selectors. We could just use a computer to pick the team and do we really want to see that?"
Right at this moment, Roy Williams might prefer it.
