Every season it arrives on schedule. A team is named, an appeal follows, supporters take sides, and then the argument stops being about one athlete and becomes about the system.
This year it is Josh Azzopardi. And the reason it has landed is simple. The athlete he beat at nationals, and ran faster than across the qualifying period, is picked in the individual 100m for the Commonwealth Games. He isn’t.
The 26-year-old made Australia’s 4x100m relay squad for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow but missed an individual berth, with Lachlan Kennedy (automatically selected), Eddie Nketia (consistently fast in the NCAA) and Rohan Browning chosen ahead of him. “I feel absolutely robbed,” he wrote. He appealed to the National Sports Tribunal and was unsuccessful.
His frustration is understandable.
So too is the case for Browning.
The 2021 Olympic and 2023 World Championship semi-finalist was a finalist at the last Commonwealth Games and owns one of the strongest championship résumés in Australian sprinting. His 10.01 PB has twice been set in championship settings, including last year’s Australian Championships. A panel seeking the athlete most likely to navigate rounds under pressure could reasonably weigh that heavily.
That is what makes the case interesting. Not that one claim is right and the other wrong, but that it raises a question Australian athletics will keep facing as the sport grows deeper: how should selectors choose between two legitimate candidates for one place?
The policy worked exactly as Australian Athletics intended
This was not a failure to define the criteria.
The 2026 Commonwealth Games Nomination Policy directs selectors weighing discretionary nominations to consider eleven factors: among them Commonwealth rankings and closeness to medal performances, results at the Australian Championships, previous Olympic, World and Commonwealth Games performances, commitment to the domestic season, current form and fitness, medal potential, future development and the ability to perform in championship-style competition.
It does not rank them. They are considered, in the policy’s words, “in no defined order”. A further clause allows the committee to consider “any factor, or combination of factors” it deems relevant in addition to the listed criteria.
That is deliberate.
In its published review of the 2024 selection policies, Athletics Australia defended retaining discretion where more athletes qualify than there are places available. The review acknowledged that, from time to time, an athlete with a top-three performance may not be selected because other factors are judged more important. It argued that selectors should be able to use a variety of measures, together with their knowledge and experience, to determine who is most likely to perform at the championship itself.
So the Azzopardi decision is not evidence that the policy failed. It operated as designed by Australian Athletics.
That does not mean the design cannot be questioned.
Both cases are built from the same rulebook
The discomfort is that the policy supports both sides.
Azzopardi can point to the Australian Championships, where he beat Browning. He can point to a strong domestic campaign, including a personal best of 10.09, and the faster mark in the qualifying period (compared to Browning’s 10.16, set at September’s world championships).
Browning can point to Olympic and World Championship semi-finals, a personal best of 10.01, his status as the leading Australian sprinter at the previous Commonwealth Games, and a better record of performing under international pressure.
Both sets of factors are named in the policy. Neither case requires ignoring it.
The dispute resonates not because selectors defied the criteria, but because the criteria allow reasonable people to prioritise different evidence, and say nothing about how to resolve the conflict when they do.
Supporters of the current approach would argue that this flexibility is precisely the point. Ranking the factors risks creating a different problem: a rigid framework that cannot adequately account for injury, championship readiness, relay considerations or the countless variables that influence performance at a major event. Different cases may require different priorities, and a panel selected for its expertise should be trusted to know which ones matter most in a given year. Reducing that to a formula would not remove the hard judgements; it would only disguise them.
However, it does not entirely settle the concern: a system can preserve flexibility while still signalling which factors are generally expected to lead when the evidence points in different directions.
The challenge of the “gut call”
Selection Chairman Peter Hamilton was candid on The Call Room podcast. He acknowledged that Azzopardi had beaten Browning at the national championships, but noted the margin “was only 0.03 seconds”. Ultimately, he described the decision as “a gut call from the team”.
Some interpreted that as an admission of subjectivity.
It is probably better understood as an acknowledgement of reality.
Hamilton’s description matters because it highlights where the policy leaves room for judgement. When eleven factors can point in different directions, the framework inevitably requires selectors to decide which evidence should carry the most weight. At the end of that process, Hamilton said, “it’s a gut call from the team.”
The concern is not that a judgement was made. The policy expressly allows for that.
The question is how much of the final decision rests on judgement, and how clearly that judgement can be explained afterwards.
Hamilton added another detail that sharpened the issue. Both athletes had effectively secured places on the Commonwealth Games team through the relay program before the individual 100m selection was finalised. This was not a choice about who travelled to Glasgow and who stayed home. It was a choice about which of two teammates received an additional individual opportunity.
Where the case for each athlete is that close, understanding the reasoning behind separating them becomes increasingly important. Not because one factor necessarily should have prevailed, but because knowing which factors the panel leaned on helps the next athlete understand what may matter most in future selections.
A close call is not a wrong call. But it invites explanation in a way a clear one does not.
The reasons exist — and will likely be seen
Azzopardi pursued every avenue the system makes available.
He appealed to the independent National Sports Tribunal and received written reasons dismissing the appeal. He has indicated he expects those reasons will eventually be published, as Tribunal determinations often are.
This is not Athletics Australia withholding information. Confidentiality sits with the Tribunal rather than the federation.
That is why the eventual publication of the decision matters.
The Tribunal’s reasoning will become the clearest public explanation yet of how an eleven-factor discretionary policy is applied in practice. Not because it will prove Browning right or Azzopardi wrong, but because it may reveal how the competing factors were weighed when they pointed in different directions.
To its credit, off the back of the 2024 marathon selection saga, Athletics Australia has already recognised the need for better communication in discretionary cases. Its 2024 review concluded that athletes who miss selection through the exercise of discretion would benefit from more comprehensive feedback and clearer explanations.
Process argument, performance argument
There are real reasons to keep discretion.
Championships are not won on paper. There are genuine cases — such as athletes returning from injury, questions of championship readiness, relay considerations or rapidly changing form — where judgement serves athletes and the sport better than a formula.
Athletics Australia’s 2024 review made a similar point when it declined to introduce a rigid pre-departure fitness standard, arguing that doing so could force athletes to peak too early and potentially compromise championship preparation. In that context, discretion earns its place.
The question is not whether discretion should exist. It is how much weight a system should place on it.
The 2026 Commonwealth Games is somewhat a special case with its 63 athlete cap, but the specific Azzopardi/Browning decision doesn’t differ from the general selection framework that leans on discretion heavily. Eleven unranked factors, an open-ended power to consider others, and no mechanism for resolving conflicts between them except for ‘gut calls’ is not a modest reserve held for exceptional circumstances. It is discretion embedded throughout the framework.
The review argues that removing discretion would “negate the need for a high-quality selection panel at all”, and could “conversely, lead to other negative outcomes”. The first claim may be true, but it is not quite the right test. As for the second, the review does not say what those outcomes would be.
The purpose of discretion is not to justify the existence of selectors. It is to produce better selections.
One is a process argument. The other is a performance argument.
The review made the first. It largely assumed the second.
Perhaps that is sufficient. Demonstrating whether discretionary selections outperform more objective alternatives is extraordinarily difficult in any high-performance sport.
But if discretion is to remain a central feature of Australian athletics’ selection philosophy, the case for increased transparency becomes even stronger.
The greater the discretionary power, the greater the need for athletes and the athletics community to understand how and why it was exercised.
In that respect, Australian Athletics should receive some credit. The Chair of Selectors did not retreat behind a confidential process or decline to engage publicly. By discussing the decision on The Call Room podcast, Peter Hamilton attempted to explain the panel’s thinking in a way that has not always been common in the sport.
The next close call
Browning may well have been the correct selection. Azzopardi may still feel aggrieved. That is understandable too.
Both can be true, because the policy was built to allow selectors to weigh competing forms of evidence and reach a judgement.
Better communication, which Athletics Australia has committed to, helps, but is only part of the answer.
The larger question is one of design.
A policy that embeds discretion throughout the framework, rather than confining it to clearly defined circumstances, will inevitably produce decisions that come down to judgement calls. Which means more appeals and extra stress for multiple athletes prior to pinnacle competitions.
Reasonable administrators may look at the same facts and conclude the current balance is the right one: that the cost — to athletes, and the sport’s reputation — of a contested call now-and-then is worth paying to preserve the flexibility a deep, fast-improving sport requires.
But the more discretion a system contains, the greater the need for athletes to understand in advance which factors are likely to carry the most weight, and the harder it becomes to reassure them that close calls are being made consistently from one year to the next.
The fixes, if the sport wants them, are not radical.
Rank the factors, or at least signal which are generally expected to lead in benchmark events. Preserve flexibility, but place it within a more visible structure. Reserve open-ended judgement for where it adds the greatest value. And allow published Tribunal decisions to build a body of precedent the sport can learn from.
Because the next close call is not a matter of if.
It is a matter of when.
