World Athletic Final, AKA: The Pump Fake Of The Year!

World Athletic Final in Stuttgart, Germany will be a no go for me this year. I came here under the impression that I would be competing in the meet. I finished #9 in the point standings, and as we all know the rules, that put me out of the running for an automatic bid and I initially had to wait for a "wild card" spot. I was obviously not good enough to run the Brussles or Berlin races to help improve my positioning at the end of the year, so I had to play the waiting game.

Good news started happening for your boy though. The German hurdler Blaschek, who got the wild card last year based soley on the fact he was German, was not running, and Aries and Liu Xiang pulled out of the race. They were both ahead of me, so I was lead to believe that that in fact elevated me from #9 to the #7 spot and the all important automatic berth.

So I'm feeling good, getting my mind in competition mode and maping out what my plans are going to be for the next couple of days as far as training and warm-up routine etc., then I get on the internet and saw that the IAAF has produced start lists without me in the meet, instead they invited Demedyuk from the Ukraine and Ladji Doucoure from France.

I'm HOT when I see this because according to their selection procedures, they clearly state that the IAAF reserves the right to invite a MAXIMUM of one athlete per event.
http://www.iaaf.org/WAF07/news/Kind=512/newsId=41519.html
Obviously that wasn't the case as TWO were invited by the IAAF, Darold Williamson is experiencing the same confusion right now that I am.

I can't argue the selection of Demedyuk for the meet, he did something I didn't do, made the finals at Worlds and he's run a decent PR this season. Their explanation for Doucoure's selection was he got in because he was the '05 World Champion. That's great and all, but this is 2007 and his credintials THIS season are a little lower than mine. I've beaten him more times this season, my season's best is a tenth of a second faster and I scored more points on the tour than he did. They want us to do all the meets to score points but at the end that wasn't really the deciding factor. What it basically boiled down to was that there were already five Americans in the race and they didn't want another.

I did have the ball in my court to not even have it come to this. I was in four Golden Leagues and like I stated back at Oslo, if I didn't make it to WAF, falling there would be the reason why, and it was. If I would have settled for 3rd place, I would have boosted my score to 66 points and would have been in automatically, but settling for 3rd isn't even a thought to a real athlete.

This is another case of confusion that needs to be clerified to all of the parties involved. I really wanted to run here and it sucks because it always seems like in situations like this, I always get the short end of the stick dating back to high school. To work so hard all season to build up a nice body of work and to have everything nullified by one person is crazy. Needless to say I'm getting out of here first thing in the morning.