Re: Who Was on the US Squad?

[lbm@ici.net]

navion wrote:
> 
> >So, as Potato said, neither Valerie or Danielle were on the 4-member
> >US team, and therefore despite finishing first and sixth, the US came
> >away with only the team silver.  Let me see, they've won the last two
> >world championships and they were not put on the official team? Now
> >that is peculiar indeed!  There was a lot of second guessing about who
> >got selected to the team in the first place, and now this?
> > (Maybe they didn't want to because
> >it had implications for how the purse would have had to be distributed?)
> >Or could the US decision-makers really have decided to write off their
> >experience in favor of other factors?
>
>    Trying to get the wars started again huh ;^}
> 
> Lets look at the situation this way.  Cash is pulled at the first vet check,
> obviously a very good decision that he was not on the team.
> 
> Jedi ties up 7 days before the ride and is lame 3 days before the ride. Who
> would think this horse is a good choice for the team? Certainly not me.  I'm
> sure sometimes the choice of team horses is tough but this time it doesn't
> look so tough.

I am going to agree at the outset that we don't *know* anything about
what actually went on and why decisions were made and who had a say
in them and who didn't.  As Angie and I have said, it could very easily
have been true that the Kanavys did not *want* to be on the 4-person
team and might have disqualified themselves for any number of reasons:
wanting to "go for it," financial, or just feeling their own horses
would not make the strongest team on that particular day.  As for what
Pete said about silver being something to be proud of.  Yes, sure.  But
it is not gold.

As for the plausible reasons you give above, with 20-20 hindsight we
can see that they were "right" about Cash (although who could predict
that the horse would trip?), and by exactly the same reasoning, they
were clearly "wrong" about Jedi (who could predict that a horse that
had tied up and wasn't feeling too sound would beat 176 of the best
distance horses and riders in the world)?

Were I doing my expected value equations trying to put together a final
team, I might go with excluding one Kanavy, but I think I'd start
juggling
my weighting factors if ended up with *both* former world champions
off the team!  Then I would have had a 50-50 chance of picking the
"wrong" Kanavy.

I tell you, though, the person I wouldn't want to be is whoever was
responsible for picking the four riders that made up the UAE team.
They had four top-10ers and would easily have walked away with the
team gold.  As it was, they had only 2 official team finishers and thus
weren't even eligible for a team medal. 

Maybe these stories will clarify themselves in the weeks to come...

Linda B. Merims
lbm@ici.net
Massachusetts, USA