On May 6, the news came out Cycling Canada would not be sending a team pursuit squad to the world championships in Shanghai in October.<\/p>\n
The women who are currently in the TP program were understandably upset given the huge focus and sacrifices they have made to be elite athletes.<\/p>\n
Many comments on social media reminded readers that the Canadian women\u2019s team pursuit program has two medals to its credit.<\/p>\n
Performance gaps and trust gaps: Cycling Canada\u2019s CEO speaks on the women\u2019s team pursuit squad\u2019s exclusion from track world champs<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n In fact, looking at Canada\u2019s medal tally since the 1996 Atlanta Games, the majority have been won by women. In 1996, Curt Harnett and Brian Walton took bronze and silver, respectively.<\/p>\n In the years that followed, all medals went to Canadian women. In 2004, Lori-Ann Muenzer won the gold. The women\u2019s TP squads took bronzes in 2012 and 2016. And then in 2020 sprinters Lauriane Genest got a bronze and Kelsey Mitchell won a gold.<\/p>\n Canadian Cycling Magazine reached out to Kevin Field<\/a>, who has a long history in the sport for his take on the matter. His extensive resum\u00e9 includes a tenure at Cycling Canada as its head of performance strategy. He has worked as a sport director for multiple pro teams. He is a firm believer in using data to inform decisions when it comes to the sport.<\/p>\n How do you read Cycling Canada\u2019s decision to cancel the women\u2019s team pursuit program for the world championships?<\/p>\n I think there are two separate things at play: the decision itself and how the system handled it. The Moneyball of Canadian Cycling<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n I also think a lot about how those decisions are made. How they are explained and sequenced matters just as much as the decision itself.<\/p>\n 5 athletes file appeal against Cycling Canada\u2019s cancellation of Women\u2019s Team Pursuit program<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n Whether it\u2019s a private team or a national sports organization\u2019s high-performance (NSO HP) program, there is a duty of athlete care and a responsibility to handle these kinds of decisions with humanity, competence and dignity.<\/p>\n It appears by those standards, this recent decision was managed poorly.<\/p>\n Would you have made a similar call? If so, what would you have done differently?<\/p>\n I probably would have ended up in a similar place from a performance standpoint. If the system is incoherent, you can underperform with the best athletes in the world. So, you need to adjust the system first.<\/p>\n Cyclists react to Cycling Canada\u2019s team pursuit decision<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n If you don\u2019t, the athletes will feel like they are absorbing the consequences of organizational underperformance.<\/p>\n When that happens, proper athlete care is likely impossible.<\/p>\n Cycling Canada says its decision was based on \u201canalysis and forecasting.\u201d What does that mean, and why is it important to discuss?<\/p>\n That kind of language is common in performance sport, but it doesn\u2019t always help people understand what actually changed.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re going to say \u201cOlympic viability,\u201d then people naturally want to know a few things.<\/p>\n What does that mean in practice? What thresholds are you using? What does success look like, and how close or far are you from it? Show the data.<\/p>\n Without all those questions being clearly answered and explained, you kind of end up with a gap between the decision and athlete\u2019s or the public\u2019s understanding of it.<\/p>\n When that gap exists, people fill it themselves.<\/p>\n The reaction online has been pretty strong around gender. Why do you think that is?<\/p>\n Once the decision was announced, the comparison to the men\u2019s program was inevitable, even if Cycling Canada says no direct comparison was made between programs.<\/p>\n From the outside, people see one Olympic pathway being removed and others continuing, and they draw their own conclusions from that.<\/p>\n Whether that\u2019s the full story or not, that perception becomes very powerful very quickly.<\/p>\n Once that narrative takes hold, it moves faster than any formal explanation can keep up with. That last part is important: make the logic legible.<\/p>\n People have also referenced the OSIC report from 2024 in this discussion. Remind us about it, and how it connects with the reactions we\u2019re seeing.<\/p>\n The Office of the Sport Integrity Commissioner (OSIC<\/a>) report matters here because many of the organizational patterns people think they\u2019re seeing now feel very similar.<\/p>\n Things like unclear decision-making, low trust in leadership, inconsistency, bias, discrimination, insider protection, process replacing accountability and athletes feeling exposed rather than backed were noted in the report.<\/p>\n
In performance sport, difficult decisions are unavoidable. If a program isn\u2019t realistically on-track to be world championship or Olympic competitive, or if the resources required to change that aren\u2019t available, leadership has to make calls that may not be popular.<\/p>\n
However, I wouldn\u2019t have started with the athletes. First look at the system that is supposed to support them. Is it coherent? Is it credible? Does it behave consistently under pressure? Is it resourced appropriately? Does it communicate clearly to athletes?<\/p>\n
The speed of the narrative gets its fuel from the athletes\u2019 credibility and their authentic emotions. Alongside that, the organization doesn\u2019t appear to have made its underlying logic legible.<\/p>\n