The U.S. Cycling Federation announced Thursday that Chloe Woodruff has withdrawn from the U.S. team for the Olympic mountain bike cross-country race in Tokyo on July 27 and will be replaced by Erin Hack, 40. However, the Associated Press report further supports the federation's claim that Woodruff withdrew for "personal reasons."
Woodruff, 33, was named to the team last month along with former world champion Kate Courtney and World Cup winner Emily Batten, who competed at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, enough to earn up to three slots from her home country in Tokyo She was part of the team effort to earn UCI points. Hack was selected as an alternate in the women's cross-country event.
However, Woodruff was well below Hack in the UCI rankings for both 2020 and 2021, and according to the Associated Press, anonymous sources said that the selection by the eight-member selection committee led Hack to request an arbitration hearing.
Allen Kruhoff, a filmmaker and photographer who has worked with Hack, stated on Instagram that "the arbitrator agreed that the selection committee did not follow its own protocol of removing Erin from the team and referred the decision back to the selection committee," but later edited the post to read "[ redacted]". Adjudication decisions are made privately and are usually confidential.
Woodruff, the 2019 national champion, won two races in 2020, the Puerto Rico MTB Cup and the Tropical MTB Challenge, before the pandemic shut down the races. Since then, Hack has outpaced Woodruff, finishing 15th and 16th in the Albstadt and Nove Mesto World Cup races, where Woodruff finished 30th and 64th, respectively.
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