Yachting-Live

No Reconsideration for Farrah Hall
A five-man Protest Committee today reaffirmed a decision made last October to remove Olympic boardsailing hopeful Farrah Hall as winner of the US Olympic Selection Trials for RS:X Windsurfing. Meeting in Providence last week, the Committee finally considered evidence found by Hall but elected not to alter its decision.

In October last year, Hall, from Annapolis, Md., won the last race of the Olympic Trials in Long Beach, Calif., and the right to represent her country at the sailing Olympics this August in Qingdao, China. Barely an hour later, the event Protest Committee named Nancy Rios of Miami, Fla., as the trials winner after Rios sought redress from a starting line collision in the last race involving a third sailor. Rios, who finished fourth, said the collision damaged her sail and hurt her ability to compete effectively. The decision dropped Hall to second place overall.

“I am disillusioned and bitterly disappointed with the Committee’s actions,” Hall said. “We provided telling photographic evidence and witness testimony from other competitors and observers that showed that Nancy Rios’ fourth place finish in the last race was not significantly affected by the collision or by a tear in her sail.

“The jury insisted on holding a one-party hearing on Nancy’s request for redress, and then asked me to prove to the same jury at a second hearing the next day that they had made a clear error at their hearing on Nancy’s redress request. As my lawyers have noted, people fighting unfair parking tickets receive more legal protection than I have as the winner on the water of the Olympic Trials.”

Farrah Hall intends to pursue her claims with a US Olympic Committee review board to demonstrate that US Sailing’s rules do not meet the minimum due process standard guaranteed by the USOC and federal law. She is also pursuing an American Arbitration Association hearing to prove that the Jury decision was clearly wrong. — Keith Taylor, www.farrahhall.com

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 18th, 2008 at 10:20 am and is filed under Yachting-live. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.