Paralympics Tri: Where will they swim?
Paralympics Tri: Where will they swim?
The matrix of possibilities.
With the Paralympics starting on Wednesday, Tim Heming is giving us some insight into the paratri racing next weekend — most notably, the changes to the course and the open question of how (and if) the swim will be held.
To stay on top of Paris, we’ll likely send next weekend’s newsletter out early with details on athletes picks and key races to watch. But first, from Tim.
UPDATE: All the races have been moved to Sunday, at present, due to concerns about weather.
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Next Sunday (Sept. 1) and Monday (Sept. 2) sees the third edition of paratriathlon at the Paralympics and it’s set to be the biggest and best yet, in every respect.
More athletes (around 120, up from 80), more categories (11, up from eight in Tokyo) and more spectators (thousands, up from officially zero in Tokyo; sorry, Japan!).
It also means that unless we have water quality issues we’ll be back in the infamous Seine. Given paratriathlon is the only sport in the Paralympic program that will be using the river — and that it costs $1.5 billion to clean-up etc etc — it’s probably the best place to start.
The race & course
Unlike its able-bodied equivalent, paratriathlon is always raced over sprint distance, which means: 750m swim, 20km bike ride, 5km run.
The venue in Paris is the same as the Olympics, centered around the Pont Alexandre III bridge, but the course has a different configuration that does require a bit more attention (at least more than USA’s Kyle Coon and guide Zack Goodman gave it in the test event, when they were disqualified for not completing all of the run laps).
Potential swim course changes
But bike and run aside for a moment, the BIG change could be in the swim, where the current is refusing to relent. We should know on Tuesday whether that means the race will be changed to a point-to-point swim and not the loop we saw at the Olympics.
If this happens, the paratriathletes will be transported upstream by boat in order to swim, current-assisted, back to the pontoon at the Pont Alexandre III and then continue the race as planned from there.
How far upstream? It all depends on the speed of the current.
The organizers will aim for a swim duration as close as possible to a typical paratri. (If you look at results, times tend to range between about 10-15 minutes.)
To achieve that duration, World Triathlon has now sent the paratri teams a matrix of possibilities. So, if, for example, the current is flowing at 1.5m/sec, athletes will start upriver 1,756m from Pont Alexandre III. A slower current, they won’t swim as far and vice versa.
As far as the optics go, this could be quite the spectacle. Pull up a map of Paris and you’ll see that a mile up the Seine retraces much of the route we saw for the Olympic opening ceremony, taking in the famous landmarks such as the Louvre and d’Orsay museums.
Not that the athletes will have much time to take this in given they’ll be flying by faster than Léon Marchand.
How a swim change could affect the race divisions
A point-to-point swim isn’t just about the logistics, it also brings challenges to race integrity in the wheelchair and visually impaired divisions.
These two classes use something called factoring — a pre-established head start for the more impaired athletes (ie. those with lower core function, or with less or zero vision). Because a few seconds in sprint distance can make a marked difference, getting the factoring or head start accurate and fair is already a contentious issue.
Of course, one of the ongoing challenges of para sports and of the Paralympics is matching up athletes of similar impairments fairly, without dividing the fields into too many extended categories. But a shorter or longer swim than normal here (without adjustments to the head starts) could be race defining. That said, so could a duathlon, which would take place if the water quality is too poor and doesn’t improve in time for the contingency date on Tuesday, Sept. 3 — an outcome that the athletes were forced to contend with at last summer’s test event, after the swims went forward for the able-bodied events but were canceled for the paratri races.
In short, the paratriathletes will have to be ready for anything.
The rest of the course
BIKE: On the bike, the overall footprint is not dissimilar to the Olympic race, but there are differences.
One of the main ones is that it’s a split transition. T1 is by the riverside rather than having to scale 36 steps on to the bridge. The bikes, handcycles, and tandems then use a slip-road up to the main road level at Pont des Invalides.
There are five bike laps with several U-turns and a dart down part of the Champs-Elysees. Although the races are spread out over two days, there is still some overlap, so like typical age-group racing you’ll see different athletes in different categories on the course at the same time.
This can make it more challenging for fans to follow (and may be part of why there was lap miscounting during the test event). However, there are also only 12-15 athletes in each category, so we’re dealing with much smaller fields.
RUN: The run, then, is two big laps and one smaller one before finishing on Pont Alexandre III, hopefully with much of the same jeopardy and excitement we saw two weeks ago in the same spot.
How to watch
In the U.S., the races will stream on Peacock. (In general, whoever the Olympic broadcaster was in your country will also be broadcasting the Paralympics — again, with more coverage than in past Paralympics.)
Paratri racing is split into categories based on classification. The ambulant classes are all of the division that are not wheelchair or visually impaired. Athletes are evaluated and classified into the appropriate category, based on their level of impairment. The higher the number of the classification category, the lower the impairment. (LISTEN: For more on classification, we did a whole Croissants & Commentary podcast episode.)
Each Paralympic morning is split into two tranches of racing and broken down as follows:
Sunday, Sept. 1: Ambulant
8:15am: PTS3 (men) - 2:15am ET/11:15pm PT
8:20am: PTS2 (men) - 2:20am ET/11:20pm PT
8:25am: PTS2 (women) - 2:25am ET/11:25pm PT
10.10am: PTS5 (men) - 4:10am ET/1:10am PT
10.15am: PTS4 (men) - 4:15am ET/1:15am PT
10:20am: PTS5 (women) - 4:20am ET/1:20am PT
10:25am: PTS4 (women) - 4:25am ET/1:25am PT
Monday, Sept 2: Wheelchair and VI
8:15am: PTWC (men) - 2:15am ET/11:15pm PT
8:25am: PTWC (women) - 2:25am ET/11:25pm PT
10am: PTVI (men) - 4am ET/1am PT
10:10am: PTVI (women) - 4:10am ET/1:10am PT