Last week, USATF announced they would only honor athletes with the Olympic standard as eligible to make the U.S. Olympic Team.

It's not difficult to understand USATF’s reasons for this—the world rankings are flawed, and they introduce even more confusion. But if USATF wanted to use the world rankings as an alternative qualifying means, they certainly could—it just would require busting out an Excel sheet to do so.

Here’s why…

Once the world rankings are finalized and made public on July 1, 2020, USATF could project which U.S. athletes would get in via the rankings by scrubbing the rankings list to only include three athletes per country and those ranked within the field size (i.e., 48 entries in the 800m, 45 entries in the 1500m, 42 entries in the 5,000m, 80 entries in the marathon, etc.).

Once this list is complete, USATF would have a clearer understanding of which athletes would get in via their world ranking and could accept or reject IAAF invites to ensure their top-three finishers get into the meet.

As an exercise, here are the distance athletes who would get into the Olympics based on the IAAF rankings as of March 26, 2018:

Note: There is a caveat—scroll down to see why USATF might not do this.

USATF Might Not Do This, Though

Unfortunately, USATF has a history of not following this procedure. 

In 2017, no U.S. men in the hammer throw had the world standard, but only 24 men in the world had the standard, so the IAAF invited eight additional athletes based on season's bests descending-order lists to fill the field of 32.

Here's who the IAAF invited and was accepted by the country's delegation:

25th Simone Falloni (ITA)

26th Chris Bennett (GBR)

27th David Soderberg (FIN)

28th Allan Wolski (BRA)

29th Rudy Winkler (USA) - 4th at U.S. Trials

30th Hassan Mahmoud (EGY)

31st Alex Young (USA) - 1st at U.S. Trials

32nd Kibwe Johnson (USA) - 6th at U.S. Trials

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33rd (1st One Out): Nejc Plesko (SLO)

34th (2nd One Out): Sean Donnelly (USA) - 3rd at U.S. Trials

As you can see, USATF could have rejected invites to the fourth- and sixth-place Olympic Trials finishers to free up two spots to get our third-place finisher into the meet, but they decided to fill the field with the first three from the IAAF's invited athletes list.