Good job boys

From the French Riviera.

Nice special edition: Sept. 11, 2023

Reminder: This is a special edition from the first men’s Ironman World Championship in Nice, France. Will be back with a shorter regular newsletter on Wednesday.

- Kelly

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I could tell you how hard the Nice course is, quote some stats about elevation, talk about the focus required on the wild descents and which athletes are good in a “tough” race—all things that have already been said. But I don’t think you can really understand it until you get out there. (And I don’t think most of the people saying those things have actually been out there.)

Let’s put it this way: On Saturday, I rode half of the course and it took me four hours. Like, I’m out of Ironman shape and I was on a rented slightly-too-big bike, but I’m not that out of shape in the scheme of triathletes. An hour in to the ride, weirdly heat fried at the race location where heat wasn’t supposed to be as big of a factor, I had to sit down outside an ice cream shop.

That showed in the race. How hard it was, how tough, it showed.

I’ll admit: I had 80% odds that Sam Laidlow was going to implode on the run. You never know with Sam. He either walks or wins. He goes all out from the start, bike course record, and he either wins or he really really doesn’t. And I had it 80-20 he was going to walk. That percentage, however, changed as the run went on.

Whatever people have said about him, look, all kudos on the day. He chooses to race for the win—and that either works or not. And it didn’t work most of the first half of his year, pretty much since his second place in Kona last October, but then it did work. When it mattered most. So, let’s take him at his word: He learned from his early mistakes at IM Lanzarote (DNF), he raced Roth not fully fit (and so had to “jog” the run but was able to see how his ride could be pushed), and he pulled out of the PTO Asia Open with COVID (new theory: did all the men who were sick post-Singapore really just have COVID coming out of the race?) and that then actually accidentally gave him a chance to rest and come into Nice more recovered. And so, as these stories go, all those setbacks brought him here, to this win, *the* win, the one that he’s been dreaming about his whole life.

And, my god, the poor guy, he couldn’t even stop crying at the finish line long enough to get out some French that I couldn’t understand but I assume was thanking everyone. He thanked his mum and dad in English, too.

Photo: Donald Miralle for IRONMAN

To win, today, here, on this course, you had to be willing to risk it all.

When Braden Currie got a penalty for littering, there was debate about whether he was going to serve it (five minutes) or simply not and risk the DQ and appeal later (he said he threw the bottle within the trash zone, not out of it). Go for the win or don’t. You’re not here for the finish.

All the men said variations of that in the pre-race press conference. We didn’t know what would happen. This course had never been raced in a world championship setting before. If you wanted to win, you had to try things and some of them would work and some wouldn’t.

I appreciate that. I appreciate what it did to the race, to the day. I appreciate the nerve, the confidence, and the willingness to know what could happen if you bet wrong. And that blew the race apart early, it played out very differently than how we usually see dudes’ races go: huge-ish gaps, one athlete off the front, a broken up field behind, the runners (Patrick Lange) hoping/trying to make up a probably insurmountable deficit.

Whatever people have to say later about Nice v. Kona, about whether this was good or not good—and people will say things—one thing was clear to me: We should have had a World Championship location in Europe a long time ago. And we should have had a different kind of course, test different kinds of strengths and weaknesses to be crowned champion, a long time ago.

Setting aside the whole question of women’s and men’s separate races and how to ensure the women will not always be second class (even though I believe you can not fundamentally set aside the basics of who a person is and the structure that dictates how they’re allowed to be that person), setting all that aside: Still, we, as a sport, need to be more than Kona.

Think about it this way: You want to know why the times to qualify for Nice were not that different, even if it rolled down a few more spots and there were a few hundred more men? It’s because the European age-group men are so goddamn deep and competitive. If/when you race in Europe, that depth is clear. The European market cares about triathlon almost like it’s a real sport. Does the U.S. ever broadcast the race live? No, of course not. But you can be sure French and German TV did yesterday (at least part of it). And, yet, to travel from Europe, this huge market, to an island in the Pacific is cost-prohibitive, is logistically nightmare-ish, it’s absurd.

So, it was well past time for there to be a world championship race here. And it was well past time for there to be a world championship testing athletes in very different conditions—conditions where we aren’t just arguing about the degree of wind on the Queen K.

Of course, the (overall generally positive) opinions are mixed about how it went. That will always be the case. Nice is a big city (pop: 1 million) and Ironman is never going to be the only show in town here. I don’t know if that’s good or bad; it just is. There’s certainly an argument to be made that it feels special-er when we take over a small town (Kona, Roth). Instead, here, there were beach-goers still beach-going, while the men ran up and down the street in front of the water. The Nice people were undisturbed by this thing interrupting their day. The upside is that when I showed up to my Airbnb Thursday evening and realized I needed to not stay there, I was able to simply book another cheap hotel for that night. That would not have been possible in Kona. And the ease with which every person loosely connected to triathlon in Europe could make the trip ensured crowds were pretty packed the whole run course—also simply a product of the four-looped, centrally located run—which is very different than the deep dark personal holes you go into all by yourself out on the Queen K.

Are there things to be fixed? Sure. Are there concerns about next year? Yep. Does everyone finally agree with me about the intense ineffectiveness of French security? You can bet by the 12th time they were stuck in the backed up line over the one pedestrian bridge, they did.

But, still. It was time for this to happen. And the dudes delivered.

A few odds and ends from the day:

• At some point, we’re going to stop talking about penalties and officiating, right? In addition to Braden’s littering penalty, Bradley Weiss (who was in the front group, chasing Sam, before it was broken up) got a drafting penalty. He still ended up 7th. The penalty situation wasn’t as nutty as last year at Kona—when it felt a bit like a random lottery—but, of course, there was still lots of arguing about the center line rule here. (For the record: There is always arguing in the pro briefing; it’s just that reporters and editors don’t usually hear about it.)

• I think the athletes mostly just handled the center line situation—though there were quite a lot of close calls and pro men scraping up against the edge of a barrier or sliding out. And while I did see one of the few bad crashes that happened—an age-grouper trying to clip in at the very start of the bike caught his wheel and clipped a barrier and flipped—and there were certainly plenty of others (broken collarbones, broken bikes, etc), as of late last night, Ironman officials told me there hadn’t been any extremely serious/life-threatening crashes. So that’s something.

• Speaking of Brad Weiss finishing, though: 7th through 9th came across the line within 30 seconds of each other and they all collapsed on the ground after and stayed there for awhile. For some reason, though, unlike in Kona, there weren’t catchers on hand to grab them. Everyone was yelling for medical, which was stationed back behind the photographers and took an uncomfortable amount of time to get there.

• The finish area flow was one of the places there definitely needs to be improvements. I could never even figure out where the podium presentation and interviews happened (though I was standing right there) and athletes’ families kept asking me how to find their people post-race. And I had no real idea.

• While people talked a lot about Cam Wurf’s descending, which is of course excellent, Sam still put time into him. And it was on the descent where Rudy Von Berg managed to pull away some time from Magnus Ditlev (who did much better at that than people suggested he would). Rudy’s descending was probably the most insane of the whole field. There’s this spot where the race organizers put up a series of barricades to force athletes to slow down before a sharp turn, and Rudy simply weaved through them.

• Yes, Magnus put a dropper post on his TT bike for the descent.

• For all that Magnus joked he’s simply too big for this course (and for all that people talked a lot about size and weight), as Patrick said post-race: Pure power clearly mattered as much power-to-weight. And, anyway, they all always look very much the same body types to me: tall-ish, extremely thin, and very fit.

• There were four French men in the top 10. And the French were going so nuts for them.

• Dr. Matt (as my mom took to calling Matthew Marquardt at Milwaukee) took 11th in his fourth pro race ever—and then had to leave straight from the finish to get back to med school class. I’m kidding, I made that up, but it’s probably true.

• No, I don’t think Jan is going to un-retire. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t have any secret info. But, no, I think he just didn’t have it on this course and this day, and then he decided to high-five his way to retirement. We all know what done looks like.

• When did long compression socks become a thing again? The men are all rocking long shorts, elbow-length sleeves, and high socks. (Of course, with entire water bladders shoved down their stomachs.) And it’s all soaking wet. I mean I know the theoretical aerodynamic benefits, but I still think it sounds miserable. Is there something here I’m missing?

• There wasn’t a ton of new gear or launches—more a product of supply chains and production issues, I think, than any commentary on Nice v. Kona—but Triathlete had a round-up of some of it. And here are the shoes of the podium.

• I went back down for midnight finishers (something I haven’t done in probably five years) and it’s always worth remembering: There are people for whom these things still mean everything. Don't lose sight of that. Though it does mean a lot more when there's a real hard deadline and we're all screaming the last person in. Apparently, now, they just finish to all the cheers and then the clock says something like 17:15 and we all just move on? (The last guy, however, was a true last finisher: Just under in 16:59. But that would have meant more if we had known before he crossed that he was really running, chasing for those last handful of seconds.) These things can still mean so much to so many.