This I did not know.... from the USAS post today --- Good job anyway
1- Dempster
2- Ryan
3- Connor
Christenson, Ryan Anderson (Wasilla, Alaska) and Connor Davis (Shelbyville, Kentucky) finished first, second and third on the scoreboard, even if the podium didn’t reflect it. Match rules were adopted to ensure countries were allowed just two medal winners in each event, thus Davis was left off the podium despite the score that said otherwise.
How very odd. Olympic Quota places are up for grabs and 2016 would be boring if it was populated entirely by Americans, so you need a control mechanism, but quota places != medals and even if you want to spread the medals about, why not simply only allow two entries per country - with an option for additional shooters to shoot for MQS but not for the podium.
If you enter a team of 3 but have 4 individual shooters, you normally have to declare your nominations beforehand rather than having the organisers simply take the top 3 scores as your team. This seems to be the opposite, where entries are open but only the top two are considered to have shot in the medals match.
No problem with limiting the number of medallists from any one team (a limit on entries does that!), but they've picked an unusual mechanism for doing it.
This has been the rules in the hemisphere shooting championships as long as they have been doing them. Since sometime in the 70's I think they started. Back then it was harder in rifle to make the US Team than it was to win an Olympic medal. America would have swept the rifle and shotgun medals and many of the pistol medals in the Championships of the Americas.
Hemmers wrote:Olympic Quota places are up for grabs and 2016 would be boring if it was populated entirely by Americans, so you need a control mechanism, but quota places != medals and even if you want to spread the medals about, why not simply only allow two entries per country - with an option for additional shooters to shoot for MQS but not for the podium.
At this match, they only gave out quotas for first place, so the fact that Connor was pushed out of a bronze doesn't affect the quotas at all.
Also, if they only allowed two entries per country, they wouldn't be able to have a team match, meaning that nobody could attempt to break team world records at the match.