Is Boyd wearing a SmartPak shirt?
After a full day of jogging, lungeing, flexions, ultrasounds, x-rays, and everything else on Monday, the US team vets know more about the health of the short listed horses than you or I will ever know about ourselves. The selectors and vets now have all the information that they will use to pick the US team for the World Equestrian Games and the purpose of this post is to explain how the selection process will play out from here. Until recently, I thought that the USEF used a Magic 8-Ball, dart board, and a printed out short list, but apparently that’s just how they selected David for the Sydney Olympics.
The true process of team selection reminds me of learning about how a bill becomes a law in government class–it goes through a lot of committees and then gets voted on. Everything will begin with the ‘Vet Panel,’ which discusses the findings from the Monday inspections and delivers their opinion on each horse to the panel of Selectors. These Selectors are the 5 people (and one European observer) that have been watching the horses all this time in preparation for the WEG selections. The Selectors are a critical part of the process, but their job is just to make nominations (recommendations)–they do not have power to formally appoint the team. Instead, the recommendation of the Selectors will be passed to the USEF’s Eventing High Performance Committee, which will then vote and pass on their own recommendations to a conference call of the USEF High Performance Working Group and USEF Executive Committee. The USEF Executive Committee will listen to the High Performance Working Group’s discussion/vote and then the Executive Committee will make the final vote to appoint the ‘Squad’ of 6 pairs. When that process is complete on Tuesday the USEF will announce the Squad, including, I suspect, the specification of which 4 riders will compete in the team competition.
From what I hear, it is rare for the committees to not follow the recommendations of the Selectors, but it is possible. Members of the committees that have a conflict of interest will recuse themselves from the votes. Link: list of committees. The USEF has done everything possible to bring home the eventing gold medals at the WEGs, and that journey will take a big step forward on Tuesday. Go eventing.
