#106: Smile, ladies!

And other questions.

issue #106: Sept. 25, 2024

This issue is sponsored by XTERRA. Don’t miss their world championship races this weekend:

I spent 23 hours yesterday making it home from Nice, so this didn’t get sent out because airplane wifi is still, in some ways, amazing you can even get any internet at all in the sky.

A quick reminder: Typically we send out a free Wednesday morning newsletter to everyone, and then paying subscribers also get a voiceover version (for their convenience) + an extra Sunday evening newsletter with a Q&A or a history dive or an article + access to the Chat + some other little odds and ends. When I’m on-the-ground at races, though, those Sunday newsletters go out to everyone and the schedule gets a little off (as do the voiceovers because planes).

Now that the only event I have left on my schedule is a few days in Kona, we should be back to our regular programming after this week!

- Kelly

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A couple last Women’s Nice thoughts…

At the end of 2021/early 2022 (basically as we came out of peak pandemic), I had this theory that in a season or two we’d see a lot of pros struggling with the repercussions of over-racing. There were just so many options all of a sudden (and that was even before the latest PTO schedule iteration) and so much desire to make good while the getting was good. I assumed we’d all make it through one season or two, and then the consequences would start to pile up.

I think it’s safe to hypothesize that this accumulation of load is part of what led to the higher number of DNSs and DNFs at Women’s Nice. It’s not that any one athlete is going to say ‘Oh, I raced too much and that led to xxx injury,’ it’s more that we know over time fatigue leads to stress leads to illness/injury/mistakes. Eventually, a set of data points becomes a trend.

We’ll see if that happens as much with Men’s Kona. I’d expect it will to a degree, but not as many men have additionally been stacking T100s and/or IM Pro Series on top of regular championships. I’d guess because more of them have sponsorship contracts that give them the luxury of not chasing the extra money.

Speaking of trends: Too many women had too many mechanicals, too many double-flats in Nice. At some point, we have to question what’s going on with the roads and the support. I still think it’s bizarre we couldn’t get a defending world champion mechanical assistance within 1km of transition (or, ffs, a spectator couldn’t give her a new wheel — IMO that is not outside assistance if it’s a random stranger, she could legally walk to a bike store and buy a new tire, right).

LISTEN: We did a full post-race recap show — including interviews with most of the podium

Photo: Donald Miralle for IRONMAN

The IM Pro Series: It’s also worth noting that, for the most part, the IM Pro Series has been a success this year — when compared to what their goals were and expectations — and IM did a good job getting behind it. The ‘everyone welcome, any pro can earn points’ attitude created a nice counter-balance in the tri ecosystem and worked just as well as a marketing tool.

BUT. When your world champion hasn’t even done enough races to be ranked in the top 20 of your series, that’s not a great look. It’s also not great when it creates this weird situation where some of the points series leaders coming into the world championship race were not favorites (not because they’re not good athletes, but simply because they were solid consistent performers who had focused on the series), and so that left the announcers trying to make it make sense for viewers.

And then you have the fact that because points are not relative to how good the field is at a given race (ie. you earn 5,000 points for any Ironman win, 6,000 for the world champs win) and you had the race blown apart to a degree, nearly everyone from Penny Slater in 7th place down earned FEWER POINTS than they already had from another regular Ironman race.

Anyway, Kat Matthews is almost certainly going to win the women’s series, because she’s planning to do one more 70.3 (either Worlds or the other one on the calendar) and unless she experiences some drastic and sudden consequence of too much load, she should then have her 5th score that’ll bump her up to the top.

A few final odds and ends

• The final finish rate, according to Ironman, was 89.2% — which seems reasonable for a world champs. Maybe we can all stop fretting now about things being too hard for women or reframe it as actually, statistically, those women finishing in 16 hours on that course are way more impressive than the same-age men finishing in 16 hours. Or, as Sara said: It’s an Ironman World Championship, it’s supposed to be hard.

• There were, however, a significantly high number of age-groupers out of the 1,471 registered who didn’t start. It was around 1,270 who started. While there’s always some number of athletes who get sick or hurt or pull out at the last minute, that seems high.

• A French girl won the overall amateur race, so kudos!

• CORRECTION: In Sunday night’s post-race newsletter, I was thinking only about pros who crashed farther out on the course and missed in my head Rachel Zilinskas’ freak crash early on.

• On my flight home, I also heard that Chelsea Sodaro almost got hit by a car as well on the descent — and then I saw the photos of how many locals’ cars were just allowed to drive in the same lane as the cyclists and heard more from some of the athletes farther back. I understand that it’s impossible to simply fully close that course through all those small towns (and I completely understand French security chaos), but there has to be more done to control the flow of traffic for a world championship race or it’s just a disaster waiting to happen.

• And maybe we could stop telling the women to smile all the time. Just a thought. Like, some athletes smile and are having fun, sure. But, some aren’t, because it’s also really really hard and that’s fine too.

• Here’s part of Laura’s winner’s speech.

• And, most importantly, the winner of our podium predictions contest is: Samantha Rothberg! (Email me or I’ll email you.)

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So, what happens now

It’s no secret that it’s a bit of open question what happens with the split Ironman world championship locations moving forward. And it seems to me there’s really two questions bundled into that one big question:

1. Should the women have their own world championship race?

This part of the question I actually think has been settled. The debate is over. No one really is still arguing the other side. There is no other sport really, at this point, where women are expected to compete for a world title mixed in with men. Or expected to do it with an unequal numbers of spots. (Yes, at the World Marathon Majors the women start usually 25 minutes ahead of the men to give them clean roads and a clean finish — but at the world championships or Olympics, they still have their own damn race.) All of the reasons for this have been clearly demonstrated: Cleaner racing, fewer officiating issues, makes for more dynamic and exciting racing, more ability to see and cover that race, more media attention which eventually begets more stars and more money. The women, pros and age-groupers, love having their own race. And honestly, I’m not super phased by the lower participation numbers of age-group women just 2.5 years into this — it takes time for development and pipelines to be created, for that to trickle down; that’s how it’s worked in every other sport ever.

And anyway, can you imagine the ESPN headlines if Ironman takes away the women’s world championship race now? I can. They’re not good.

2. Should the world championships rotate out of or leave Kona?

Of course, the first question is simply the question of whether the women should have their own race and day — not whether they should be in the same location and timeframe as the men. Because that brings us to the second question that I think is baked into the future of Ironman: How attached should we, as a sport, still be to Kona?

Obviously, Kona has the mythology, the NBC special, the dreams that have been created and sold and packaged. (I mean that non-cynically, just factually.) It’s cool, from a triathlon history perspective, to be able to run down the road where Julie Moss crawled. But, it’s also limiting. There is a cap on the number of people that town can hold, on how many the race course can handle. There’s only so much room to grow in Kona — and you can think it was better when the race was just 1,500 men mostly from N. America, but that’s not going to grow the sport globally. It’s more convenient for me, personally, to fly to Kona than to Nice, but for most people in the world it is not convenient. It’s a PITA and expensive. If the world championship stays forever on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, then that’s what we’ve chosen as our future. One with limits and confines on where we can go from here and what we can become. We will always be admitting our greatest days are behind us.

Nearly every woman, age-group, pro, random athlete I ran into, said they loved the Nice course. It was so exciting and dynamic and hard. They loved coming to Nice, too, from an overall trip perspective. It reaches different regions and demographics. And, in general, most pros also think there should be different types of course and conditions in which we crown a world champion. How can you be the best in the world if you’re only ever the best in one place?

To me, personally, the solution is to rotate a two-day world champs annually to three or four set locations globally (Nice, Cairns, Kona, somewhere on the East Coast in N. America, etc) — and you commit to it the way you committed to 70.3 Worlds and in a decade it’ll be something new. But there are, of course, challenges with that, too. It depends on what you think the answers to these two questions are.

How Ironman chooses to answer will probably ultimately depend on how much they’re willing to make a long-term play v. how much they need short-term solutions. The sport, the industry, is still struggling, and I can imagine it’d be easy to tell a board ‘going back to what we know works (ie. one-day in Kona) will solve all our problems.’ But it won’t. It’ll just create different problems.

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Photo: Courtesy of XTERRA

Another World Championship already

I also keep thinking that part of me is just so not excited to run around parking lots and bike paths anymore. And if I was a good mountain biker at all (which I am not), then I would be very into off-road triathloning.

Next best thing: Watching it.

XTERRA actually did the thing we’re talking about and made the move of their World Championship race to somewhere new in Trentino, Italy a few years ago and created an XTERRA World Cup series with a points leaderboard and series prize money. And now the World Championship race this weekend has its own additional $100K in prize money and multiple races within the race.

• Thursday at 2 p.m. local time/8 a.m. ET: The Short Track race — which is ~40 minutes, super intense

• Saturday at 9:45 a.m. local time/3:45 a.m. ET: The full-distance World Championship race — which will have a lot of the same athletes (who didn’t crash, presumably) going for the big points

• Sunday at 9:20 a.m. local time/3:20 a.m. ET: The first youth world championship

The French Forissier brothers have been battling all season, but older brother Arthur is out now with an injury, so the younger Felix will have to represent. He’ll have up against him the other Arthur, Arthur Serrières, who is looking to defend his last two world championship titles.

And Solenne Billouin is also hoping to win her third world championship in a row, but Loanne Duvoisin (who only raced the European Championships in the series but won that) could upset. I’m not totally sure how the Europeans got so good at XTERRA, but they did!

WATCH: All of them will be streamed live on XTERRA and on their Youtube — or you can watch the recap if you wake up later — and see the full race preview here

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The best of the rest

• T100 Ibiza: Of course, the big one that most of the on-road long-course/medium-course athletes are headed to next — and the first chance for us to see some of the Olympians at the T100 distance; full preview here

  • While all of the contracted women had committed to the race, it was expected that we certainly wouldn’t see everyone after Nice. So far it’s only Lucy CB & Laura Philipp who have pulled out on the women’s side and Kyle Smith on the men’s. Full start lists here with I’m sure to come a few more wildcards…

  • WATCH: On T100’s Youtube on Saturday - men @ 8 a.m. local time/ 2 a.m. ET & woman @ 10:30 a.m. local time/ 4:30 a.m. ET

• World Triathlon Championship Series - Weihai: The one that got upgraded to a WTCS from a World Cup — actually has an interesting and hilly course (unique for a WTCS these days!) and the last one before the finals in Spain at the end of October. While a few names are missing, of course, we have a full British contingent of women, some interesting U.S. names (Gwen Jorgensen is back), the French men, and Alex Yee & Hayden Wilde.

  • WATCH: On TriathlonLive.tv on Thursday - men @ 8:15 p.m. ET & woman @ 11:30 p.m. ET

• IM Chattanooga: Drawing an interesting number of N. American based pros and we’re all secretly in our hearts rooting for Cody Beals; no live coverage but start list here (although it says Joe Skipper represents the U.S., which he definitely doesn’t)

Results from this weekend: Challenge San Remo, Italy 70.3, Cozumel 70.3, World Triathlon European Champs - Vichy (a special congrats to Vicky Holland on the win)

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The -ish

Stuff from around our sports worth knowing about this week.

• The dreamiest triathlete in triathlon, Javi Gomez, is officially retiring at the end of the year. (Instagram)

• UCI World Champs started, with the TT races this past weekend and the road races coming up this weekend. Both Remco Evenepoel and Grace Brown became the first athletes to win the Olympics and World Champs TTs in the same year. And our Canadian representing for triathletes, Paula Findlay, took 18th. (Instagram/Youtube)

• Didn’t realize this pro cyclist who raced in the Giro won Weymouth 70.3 earlier this month. (Triathlon 220)

• Tara Dower set the overall FKT for the Appalachian Trail (2,197 miles in 40 days, 18 hours, and 5 minutes), becoming the first person to go under 41 days and the first woman to hold the overall record in a decade. And I really enjoyed this compilation of her napping on the side of the trail. Naturally, some hiking purists are already lamenting that she’s ruining the “experience” by going too fast because niche sports always gonna niche. (Outside/Instagram/The Trek)

• I can’t quite get my head around this whole thing about ultrarunning world record holder Camille Herron allegedly editing Wikipedia pages of her competitors. And then her husband saying it was really him and everyone’s bullying Camille. I dunno, it’s hard for me to get super worked up because even the best athletes in the world are still people and sometimes they do stupid things or get caught up or shit happens. (Canadian Running Magazine/Ian Corless)

• I quite enjoy the Golden Trail World Series, and if I was getting into something new right now that feels fun — and by fun, I mean fast and nutty. (Instagram)

• Tomas Rodriguez Hernandez, who was popped for doping after winning IM Texas, has officially agreed to a two-year suspension starting retroactively June 6, 2024 and voiding his IM Texas win back in April. He’s implying (and in a since-deleted IG post) he only got two years because he was able to show there was the possibility of contamination (and it’s not not possible) — but I’d like to point out it’s fairly standard for anti-doping agencies to offer a shorter sanction if the athlete agrees right now and doesn’t fight the charge, whereas if they fight it and lose then they’ll get the full four years. Sorta like a plea deal. So I don’t think a two-year sanction actually means anything other than that it’s a two-year sanction. (ITA/Triathlete/Norwand Sports Law)

• Are triathlon swims a thing of the past? I mean yeah, to a degree, because climate change is real. (Cody Beals)

• An update from Luisa Baptista after getting horrifically hit by a motorcycle back in December. (Instagram)

• Athlos NYC — the $600K all-womens, six-event track meet that also has Megan Thee Stallion performing because by god track is going to make itself cool — is this Thursday. (SELF)

• And I was super excited to hear that one of our Triathlonish readers, who I chatted with during the one-on-ones with paying subscribers last year about opening a women’s sports bar here in the Bay Area, is actually doing it! Go follow The Change Up! (Instagram)

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One last thing

When we were standing on the beach during the swim, we couldn’t figure out why one of the photographer divers was out there in just a t-shirt. Why didn’t he have a wetsuit! Well, the legend Donald Miralle has a story about that.