I was a pretty active triathlete from the mid 1980's to the mid-1990's. It was a great experience being part of triathlon in Canada in the 1980's. The sport was still new and the community was close knit and open to anyone. My first triathlon is a bittersweet memory. I bought a bike and entered my first tri (London, ON) just a couple of weeks later. The race itself was very, very painful. The swim and bike were actually not too bad. I can remember seeing a friend on the early part of the run course, as I was heading back into the transition. I can also remember thinking to myself that I was going to get of the bike and run him down. Except that I literally lost the ability to run. It took every ounce of energy just to walk/jog/crawl the 10km run.
What I do remember was how welcoming the community was to a very green triathlete. I was a casual acquaintance with a couple of the top triathletes in the province (Augy Marmello and Paul Herd) and as a result a friend of theirs was kind enough to put me up (Richard Brown, who won the race I recall). It turned what might have been a horrible experience into a memorable one, and I was hooked.
If this was what triathlon had turned into in the 10 years since I'd left the sport it was a big, big disappointment. But I decided to reserve judgment. So this year, I've been watching as many of the new, Dextro Energy Triathlon, ITU World Championship Series, as I can to see if the pattern I'd witnessed live was in fact a common theme. Sure enough it seems it is. The swim and bike are essentially neutralized, making the typical ITU "triathlon' nothing more than a glorified 10k run. Plus the bike section is very, very boring. Right up there with watching paint dry or grass grow.
I raced for the next 10 years, mostly in Ontario but occasionally venturing further afield (Montreal, Calgary, Tupper Lake NY and Manchester). It was a lot of fun training and racing with friends and I have many great memories of the people I got to meet along the way. I left the sport in 1995, mostly due to injuries and burnout. Two a day workouts wear you out after a while.
After I left, the sport grew, eventually making it to the Olympics. Along the way there were some changes -- drafting was made legal on the bike, the swim was made more spectator friendly and the rest of the world caught on. I didn't actually watch another triathlon (live) until 2007 when Vancouver hosted the Triathlon World Championships. It was, for me, a big disappointment. Sarah
Haskins and Sarah McLarty managed to gain a small advantage out of the water and were working hard to turn it into enough time to hold off the runners. Unfortunately the American pair were thwarted by the chasing pack -- most of the work being done by a couple of Americans. WTF?
There was an American coach on Thurlow, so I asked him about the bizarre tactics. It turns out the tactics weren't bizarre they were non existent. He said that each of the athletes ran their own race without regard to "teammates". A really stupid move as far as I was concerned, as the results would validate. Samantha Warriner ran down both the American's to win. Haskins thankfully hung on for second but if the American coaches were satisfied with handing a win to the Kiwi's maybe they need to be replaced.
Last year Vancouver hosted the Triathlon World Championships. It was the last big test before the Olympics so again I was excited to see some fast and furious racing. Again I was disappointed. In the men's race few athlete's came out of the water with a small gap, but this was brought back by the large chase pack and so, with the exception of a few half-hearted attacks the bike was neutralized. The race essentially came down to a 10k run. The advantage went to the fast runners, who spent the bike leg, hiding in the pack and then simply ran away from the field.
If this was what triathlon had turned into in the 10 years since I'd left the sport it was a big, big disappointment. But I decided to reserve judgment. So this year, I've been watching as many of the new, Dextro Energy Triathlon, ITU World Championship Series, as I can to see if the pattern I'd witnessed live was in fact a common theme. Sure enough it seems it is. The swim and bike are essentially neutralized, making the typical ITU "triathlon' nothing more than a glorified 10k run. Plus the bike section is very, very boring. Right up there with watching paint dry or grass grow.
Don't believe me? Well, let's look at the bike splits at some of the recent ITU Dextro Energy Super Duper triathlons. At Kitzbuhel, the speed was 43.6km per hour, about the same time as the Stage 5 of the TdF (196km). At the Hyvee triathlon it was 41.4km/h and it seems that alot of the men's bike splits are in that 41 to 42km/h which is not bad but not great considering these are the best triathletes in the world. In fact that's the same speed Normann Stadler rode at the Roth Ironman (42.4km/h).
That's 180km by himself not drafting and he's going the same speed as the top short course men in the world. Not very impressive. The winner Micheal Gohner averaged 41.3km/h. In fact it's even slower than the winner of the Master's 1 division at the Peterbourough ITT, a local Ontario race (43.5km/h). The lethargic pace allows the runners to conserve a ton of energy. Mostly, they hide in the pack and spin around the course for an hour and then get off the bike and blast away on the run. Great for them but not the spectators. You have to wonder though, why the other athletes put any effort at all into it. If I was racing, I would completely shut down as soon as a break went off the front and force the runners to do all of the work to chase it back. It seems beyond stupid that these guys are at the front doing work to bring back breaks -- they're handing the race to the runners. Dumb, dumb dumb. Boring, boring, boring.
So what can the ITU do to make things better? A few things actually.
- Introduce trade teams. If you make the teams large enough (minimum 5 athletes, not the 2 or 3 we saw at the Olympics) they allow for the real introduction of tactics. If the teams are large enough they can be tweaked to suit different courses. For example on a hilly course you might have 3 swim bike specialists and 2 all rounders (or one all rounder and one run specialist). This would allow teams to initiate breaks that would be large enough to make significant time gaps (not the typical 90 seconds or under that always result in a catch by the run specialists). Breaks need at least 3 minutes to make it hard for the runners. Teams also allow the introduction of counter-attacks if an initial break is brought back and other tactics like blocking etc. This would make the bike (and the swim) section more meaningful.
- Introduce greater variability into the courses. This includes both terrain and distance. Why does the ITU feel the need to stick to the same boring distance for every race (1.5/40/10). This too makes the race predictable and generally means that the same athletes are going to end up on the podium most of the time. The ITU would do well to take a page out of cycling's Classics races which have highly variable terrain and distances which suit very different athletes. Early classics like Ronde van Vlaanderen and Paris Roubaix suit big strongmen like Boonen, Cancellara and Hushovd, while later classics like Liege and Amstel Gold suit climbers who can can pack a punch (Cunego, Rebellin, Bettini). Then there's San Remo custom built for the sprinters like Zabel, Cavendish and Freire. The point is that the courses favour different riders and team compositions. It makes if fun and interesting. Why can't the ITU make some of the bike courses longer and more difficult so that it has more of an impact on the race?
- Teach the athletes how to ride. There's no excuse for the terrible bike handling skills we see regularly at the ITU races. These guys are supposed to be the top pros in the field and yet you regularly see bizarre crashes. Kitzbuhel is a perfect example. There was a crash in the middle of the pack on a perfectly wide, straight, flat road. Even the crashes on the one corner were strange. It was a wide sweeping corner. I've been in master's races where we've descended at over 60km/h over terrible roads (sand, broken road) and seen fewer crashes than the pristine courses these guys ride on. There's no excuse for this but the terrible bike handling skills could also be a factor on why there's so little action on the bike.
And why is the one shining light in this mess, the Team World Championships (again not part of the Championship series but the World Cup, which makes sense in ITU bizarro land), only held once? It was, exciting and fun to watch. And the mixed teams reaffirm triathlon's heritage of equality. Great entertainment and easily the best triathlon I've seen in the past two years. The only question is why it's only held once. It should be a regular fixture on the schedule.
Well let's see if the ITU wakes up. If not they can maybe count on hardcore triathletes to tune in. But for folks like me, who are interested in the sport, well I'll just hit the snooze button next time.
