Originally Posted by
beachmouse
She competed today with borrowed poles (the announcers described it as asking a professional golfer to compete at a major tournament with borrowed clubs) and went out at 4.54 meters. Her season's best is a 4.75 at Commies a few weeks back, and assumption is she was in similar form here. 4.54 got her 7th place and two points toward qualifying for the very high paycheck Diamond League Final, which is the biggest event of the track & field sports schedule for 2018. (non-outdoor World Championships, non-Olympic year) The winning vault today by Sandi Morris was a 4.74, which got Sandi 8 points toward the Diamond League final .
Given that elite athletes only get a certain number of invitations to the 'regular season' Diamond League meetings, and that Newman underperformend compared to Commies with unfamiliar equipment, it's not that much of a pathway for the broken poles in Doha to lead to a failure to qualify for the final and high placing in the DL final, and as much as a six figure (USD/CAD) loss in income from prize money, sponsorship deals, and appearance fees an athlete who is A- list on the global track scene can get.
With respect, the idea that "I lost my chance at an Olympic gold medal [or whatever] and it's your fault" is not testable. People lose competitions in, for example, bobsledding even though they had the finest technology of sled in tiptop condition - but all it took was for the driver to allow the sled to bump the chute for 1/10th of a second and that was that. The top ten scores can be so close, it's almost a crap shoot.
In other words, the 'tolerances' of many high level sporting competitions are so fine these days, that it is anyone's guess why someone wins...or loses.
Back to the airline. If they accepted the poles as cargo, this in reality means at best, they could only guarantee the specifications of such processes as they control, they can't guarantee an outcome to any specific shipment.For example, they could promise that insofar as their handling equipment is concerned, stresses on the package won't exceed so many pounds per square inch or whatever (I am not a structural engineer but you get the drift.)
But they can't guarantee the outcome unless, amongst other things, they don't accept something as cargo until after they subject the cargo to whatever imaging technique would show up any hairline cracks that already existed (for example). It's also unlikely that they could guarantee that something else in the cargo hold adjacent to the poles wouldn't cause a problem given that while they load the cargo they accept, they don't pack the cargo they accept. Also, the packing requirements of poles is not something even the athlete would necessarily know in detail. "I shipped them before like this and it worked out okay" doesn't mean that that method was truly suitable for shipping the poles.
Bottom line, if the airline doesn't accept the poles, period, then the athlete's chances of even competing let alone winning are at zero. But if they accept sensitive equipment, there is risk. Can they mitigate that risk, could they have done so in this instance? Not enough information to know.