Predictive judgment, continuity baselines, and earned deference in elite sport selection

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 accurate, baseline-aware, or improved on a simple comparator. The paper develops predictive-judgment benchmarking as one necessary component of 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. The empirical analysis is a proof of concept for auditing future-facing judgment rather than an estimate of private selection accuracy. In the biathlon record, an outcome-scored continuity rule was more accurate than the recorded forecasts overall and in the coach/sport-leader subset, although the leader samples were small and context-specific. Comparator contexts produced mixed results and generated, rather than tested, a task-structured hypothesis. These findings do not show that sport leaders lack expertise. They show that high-consequence discretion can operate without a systematic, scoreable record of the prediction it contains. The paper argues for a lightweight override ledger that records discretionary departures from objective criteria or transparent baselines. If discretion is valuable enough to preserve, the predictive component should be documented, compared with baselines, and reviewed over time.