There may be some valid reasons for cancelling the women’s team pursuit program, but there’s more to it

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.

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.

Many comments on social media reminded readers that the Canadian women’s team pursuit program has two medals to its credit.

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In fact, looking at Canada’s 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.

In the years that followed, all medals went to Canadian women. In 2004, Lori-Ann Muenzer won the gold. The women’s TP squads took bronzes in 2012 and 2016. And then in 2020 sprinters Lauriane Genest got a bronze and Kelsey Mitchell won a gold.

Canadian Cycling Magazine reached out to Kevin Field, who has a long history in the sport for his take on the matter. His extensive resumé 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.

How do you read Cycling Canada’s decision to cancel the women’s team pursuit program for the world championships?

I think there are two separate things at play: the decision itself and how the system handled it.
In performance sport, difficult decisions are unavoidable. If a program isn’t realistically on-track to be world championship or Olympic competitive, or if the resources required to change that aren’t available, leadership has to make calls that may not be popular.

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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.

Whether it’s a private team or a national sports organization’s 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.

It appears by those standards, this recent decision was managed poorly.

Would you have made a similar call? If so, what would you have done differently?

I probably would have ended up in a similar place from a performance standpoint.
However, I wouldn’t have started with…