In field events, UK Athletics should select every athlete who holds a Road-to-[championship] Qualifying Position - by entry standard or ranking - and reject no one. For field, there should be no extra selection test.
Why:
If UK Athletics thinks its judgement picks future field medallists better than qualification does, it should publish the evidence.
Share of Olympic/World and European medals won in field events, by four-year period. GB & NI is bottom of comparable European groups (detail).
GB & NI's medal rate (medals as a % of entrants) is rising and has been at or above Europe's in 4 of the last 7 periods - but track is driving it, while field has fallen from 31% of GB & NI's entrants to 22% and is in decline.
GB & NI's share of medals that are field is falling and is now the lowest of any European country group (2024-2027), as field becomes a shrinking part of the team.
The UK does not host enough Category C-or-better meets (5 in 2026, ranked 16 of 46 European countries), which will matter for selection if UK Athletics keeps leaving out athletes who hold a Road to [championship] Qualifying Position.
Field medallists are older than track medallists: 27.5 years on average at an Olympic/World medal, compared with 26.1 for track.
Field athletes compete in more major championships than track athletes before their first Olympic/World medal: 3.8, compared with 2.6 for track.
60% of Olympic/World javelin medallists fell below UK Athletics' performance funnel before their first medal, and 11% were below it for half or more of their seasons, so deselecting a javelin thrower for falling below the funnel makes no sense.
The mark needed to reach a final is much harder to predict in field than in track, and hardest of all in the throws: it swings 2.9% between championships in the throws, compared with 1.2% in track.
No method predicts the javelin qualifying mark well enough to deselect on: even the best is typically out by 1.3m, and ranking on current form over-predicted in 10 of 10 editions, so a predicted mark is little better than a guess.
UK Athletics was the only federation found leaving out athletes who held a Road to Birmingham Qualifying Position - at least five were not selected, including five field athletes - while nine of the ten federations with their own internal standard ignored it and sent their qualified athletes.
A field athlete left out on the panel's judgement cannot challenge it: the appeals procedure excludes the panel's "judgement and discretion", the call that matters most in the field events, where predictions have been shown to be unreliable.
Athletes have no vote in UK Athletics' selection: the Athletes' Commission is only a non-voting observer, and the athlete engagement strategy the governance code requires isn't published.
UK Athletics' tighter selection from 2023 hit field harder than track: new field caps fell to 0.0% at Budapest 2023 and stayed under 10% for three more editions while track's did not, with no field medal gain to show for it.
A panel can see things no dataset captures - injury, a technical change, form on the day - and budgets are finite. But the statistical claim, that judgement picks future field medallists better than qualification does, is not supported by Groups B and C.
Everything here is from public World Athletics data or published governing-body documents, sourced on each page.
England Athletics' Field Events Review (May 2025) found field and combined events are 43% of Olympic athletics medals, yet since 2000 the UK has won 6 in the jumps, 6 in the heptathlon and 2 in the throws. Steve Backley (Athletics Weekly, April 2024) calls the decline structural. The Review deliberately left senior selection to UK Athletics. This project covers that gap: selection, appeals and the statistics behind selection judgements.
Pages 6 and 8 use javelin, where this site's data is most complete.
Printable version - use Print » Save as PDF. Data updates every few days as World Athletics publishes results, so figures can change.
Pages 1, 2, 4-8 and 12 query World Athletics data live. Page 9 uses federations' published selection policies; pages 10 and 11 published UK Athletics and governance documents, paragraph-cited. Page 3's meet counts are live; its event table is a dated snapshot. Corrections welcome.