Abstract: Predictive Judgment, Continuity Baselines, and Earned Deference in Elite Sport Selection
Under Review

Elite sport selection is usually treated as expert evaluation, but it is also prediction. Coaches, selectors, high-performance directors, and selection panels make future-facing judgments about readiness, potential, and expected performance, and those judgments can control access to scarce athlete opportunity. This article distinguishes process compliance from the predictive component of decision quality. Procedural review can determine whether a selector had authority, followed criteria, gave reasons, and acted within an authorized range. It does not show whether the embedded performance judgment was calibrated, baseline-aware, or better than a simple comparator. The paper develops predictive-judgment benchmarking as a necessary condition for earned deference in elite sport governance. It combines published selection-policy examples, public forecast records, and talent-identification research on false negatives and nonlinear development. Forecasts were compared with prior-season continuity baselines across Olympic-relevant biathlon records and professional and NCAA comparator contexts. The available Olympic-relevant record was thin and did not show stable separation from continuity. Comparator contexts showed stronger signals in bounded team or contender-identification tasks, while individual projection tasks showed weaker or less stable separation. These findings do not prove that sport leaders lack expertise, nor do they estimate private selection accuracy. They show that high-consequence discretion often operates without a systematic, scoreable record of the prediction it contains. The paper argues for a lightweight override ledger that records only discretionary departures from objective criteria or transparent baselines. If discretion is valuable enough to preserve, the predictive judgment embedded in it should be documented, compared with baselines, and reviewed over time.

Keywords: Predictive judgment, Elite sport governance,, Discretionary selection, Continuity baseline, Forecast audit