#101: TriBike Transport is suing Ironman
#101: TriBike Transport is suing Ironman
Because this kind of drama is what we do best.
issue #101: Aug. 21, 2024
All-sporters, I’m back home! Finally! And let me tell you: California’s terrible, don’t come. 😉 I’ll be home for three whole weeks before it’s back to France for Women’s Nice and championship season.
We’ve got a big newsletter today — with a lot of updates — so let’s get right down to it. And we’ll talk more soon, probably in the next two weeks, about the upcoming world champs season and what it all “means.”
- Kelly
Supertri is fun
That’s the quick summary: Supertri is just fun, fun to watch, fun to follow, lots more fun in-person than other pro races. That doesn’t mean people necessarily understand it or that it *will* succeed, but it does mean it has potential without relying on needing everyone to be deep tri superfans.
Here are my quick takeaways from the ground at the first Supertri race of the season — which went out to paying subscribers this past weekend and is open for everyone now:
I’ve also heard a few people say there weren’t huge crowds and that it wasn’t promoted well locally, but I dunno, it was raining all morning in Boston and the number of spectators seemed normal-ish to me? Definitely not crazy crowds, for sure, but I was in the main Supertri transition area and didn’t stay in the Boston Triathlon beer garden to see how many age-groupers stuck around. (The beer garden was totally full when I left it.)
Plus, I don’t really know that the number of spectators on the ground is going to be the thing that makes or breaks Supertri. I think that will probably come down more to the broadcast and the business model (and whether the move to big city mass participation events works). And on the pro athlete side of the business, it will likely actually depend more on if this new Supertri focus on teams/franchises works out or not.
The actual race: The Olympic medalists in the women’s race looked tired — and yes, Cassandre Beaugrand was limping. The men’s race stayed together slightly more (or at least the front pack did) and so then the 3x through super-short format becomes a game of no room for even the slightest error and you better be able to run a 2:40 kilometer at the end. Also, an aside, I was standing at the corner of the quick right-left turn on the bike and I almost leaned just slightly too far over the barricade and nearly got hit during the women’s race. So that shit is tiiiiiight.
Women:
Jeanne Lehair
Georgia Taylor-Brown
Kate Waugh
Taylor Spivey
Men:
Alex Yee
Hayden Wilde
Dorian Coninx
Tim Hellwig
Full results here: Supertri
Who’s qualified for Men’s Kona & Women’s Nice?
IM Frankfurt! Holy shit, right? I think we all knew that Kristian Blummenfelt was going to be just fine in his validation race, even though he hadn’t ridden a TT bike since last year. But I don’t know if we thought he was going to set a course record. (Even if the bike course was about 5km short, he went fast and then he ran a 2:32 marathon with port-a-potty stops and vomiting.)
I also appreciated his honesty that he would have taken an Olympic win over this win. I mean, yeah, no kidding, me too.
Now that this past weekend was officially the final IM World Champs qualifying races we have full Women’s Nice & Men’s Kona start lists (scroll down on the Ironman page) — with, of course, a few updates like neither Skye Moench or Daniela Ryf will be racing.
Triathlete also has some fun data breakdowns of the women’s and men’s fields and updated lists. And the Slowtwitch forum has started gearing up for annual ‘it’s too easy for women to qualify’ tradition (though you know that when even ‘twitch commenters are saying this horse has been beaten to death and it doesn’t affect your life and the women’s race was overwhelmingly positive so get over it, that it’s time to get off the damn horse).
All of which means: It’s almost time for Ironman World Champs szn.
And now the update you probably had forgotten you wanted until this email: TriBike sues Ironman
First, quick recap of how we got here:
The shipping company that TriBike contracted with to get bikes to/from the AG World Champs in Spain last fall filed a suit arguing TriBike owed them $319,000 — and then held 183 athletes’ bikes hostage until they were paid. Fun.
It was a mess. Eventually the bikes were returned (via an insurance settlement), but TriBike Transport essentially went out of business during the fallout.
Turns out: Earlier this spring TriBike filed their own lawsuit against Ironman (you can see the complaint here), arguing that because Ironman failed to fulfill its marketing obligations TriBike experienced significant drops in revenue — which, in essence, was the root of its financial problems. Specifically, TriBike is arguing that Ironman did not send the contractually obligated direct emails to athletes promoting its services.
TriBike does not specify an amount of damages in the suit, and they wouldn’t tell me a number either other than it’ll come out in the litigation. I also wanted to know how they could prove that the drop in revenue was because of a lack of Ironman marketing/direct emails and not because of the overall decrease in participation and events during the peak of the pandemic.
Ironman won’t really comment on lawsuits either, other than to say they fulfilled all their contractual obligations, but I think this sentence from their motion to dismiss kinda sums up their official position:
“This lawsuit appears to be TriBike’s attempt to lay blame on external parties for its own recent financial problems.”
What will happen next?
The suit reportedly is going to depositions, which doesn’t necessarily mean anything other than that’s the next step. Just as filing a suit doesn’t necessarily mean anything other than that we live in America and it’s your right (and that’s actually a good thing).
Ultimately, one of the questions that I think will be at the heart of the suit, and at the heart of how this plays out — which isn’t exactly a legal question, but more of a business one — is this: Even if Ironman didn’t fulfill its direct-marketing obligations and even if that devastated the TriBike sign-ups and revenue, how does that lead to TriBike owing so much money to its own suppliers and vendors that it causes a domino collapse? Of course, vendor contracts have to be signed in advance and those contracts & costs have to be based then on revenue projections (that’s how business works), and so when those projections are wrong it can be really bad. And maybe that’s just the simple answer. But the bigger argument here — beyond any specific line item claim of damage — is going to be a harder legal case to make.
The best of the rest of the results
IM Frankfurt: Honestly, the top nine athletes all went under Sebi Kienle’s old course best. And the breakout race of the Men’s IM European Champs was definitely Kieran Lindars’ second place in his first-ever full. Will be fun to see what he does now.
IM Sweden: A smaller women’s pro race just because of prize money and spots, won by Marlene De Boer (who, fyi, won the overall AG IM world champs in 2021, so there you go, glad she upgraded).
XTERRA Germany: The men’s series is getting tighter and tighter as we get down to the final races. Arthur Serrieres’ win in Germany pushed him a little closer to the battle for 1-2.
Full results: IM Frankfurt, IM Sweden, Embrun, XTERRA Germany
Mark your calendar
70.3 Tallinn: European 70.3 Champs this weekend & I gather this is going to be a fight for IM Pro Series points — with quite the fields of people trying to clock in a few more races (Kat Matthews, Tamara Jewett, Els Visser, Cam Wurf, Kacper Stepniak).
WATCH: Sunday at 1:30 a.m. ET/10:30 p.m. PT on Saturday on proseries.ironman.com or Outside Watch
IM Canada: A lot of Canadians (and Americans) headed to the final Penticton race — including, of course, Lionel Sanders.
World Tri Long Distance World Championships: A handful of pro athletes are headed to Australia for this (which is, obviously, slightly confusing in the patchwork of world championships).
The -ish
Stuff from around our sports worth knowing about this week.
ICY(somehow)MI: Daniela Ryf announced her early retirement. And I feel like my lowkey campaign to get everyone to acknowledge that she has long been the GOAT of long-course triathlon is now officially a success. (Instagram)
Holy hell, the Tour de France Femmes. FOUR SECONDS! It came down to four seconds after Demi Vollering’s crash and Kasia Niewiadoma’s all-out effort to hold onto every second she could. I also just learned that Kasia is married to Taylor Phinney — and I dare you not to cry at these photos & this story. Be Taylor to someone’s Kasia, guys. (Instagram/Escape Collective/Twitter)
The Vuelta is happening now too — and is the next big American hope also the son of the head ref for Ironman? (Yes, the answer is yes! So that’s cool.) (Velo)
My favorite random fact from the Supertri race is that Beth Potter flew straight from Boston Sunday night to London for the Taylor Swift concert and then back to Chicago for the next Supertri race this weekend. (Instagram)
And I will say this about the news of USAT cutting funding for national team athletes to World Cup races: I was shooting the shit with quite a few U.S. athletes and coaches and USAT people this weekend, and one of the ongoing hot topics lately has been development and what to do about the talent pipeline, and yet no one mentioned these cuts. So either they didn’t know yet or they just didn’t think it was a big deal? Not sure. (Slowtwitch)
Also talked to a couple of pros about the survey Ironman is sending around to all its Ironman Pro Series athletes. And the survey is wide-ranging — questions like: who manages your social media, what would improve your experience in the Pro Series, and yes what factors affect your decision to race IM Pro Series races/Challenge races/PTO races/etc. That includes questions about how Pro Series exclusivity or exclusive contract would impact those decisions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Multisport World Champs is happening right now in Australia (see: pro Long Distance world champs race is later this week) and I didn’t realize that World Tri was awarding medals for athletes with intellectual impairment. (World Triathlon)
What is happening with the never-actually-announced T100 Grand Finale? The PTO says they’ll have an update in the next few weeks but it sounds like the options are either find a new location or revise it down to just a seven-event series. (Twitter)
David Roche broke the course record at Leadville 100 this past weekend, which is mostly cool because apparently a lot of people on the internets were like ‘how can he coach 100s if he’s never done one’ and because his self-predicted splits were correct to the minute. (Runner’s World/Twitter)
UTMB is coming up (!) — men’s & women’s preview — and I do really want to put my lottery stones in for next year but also oof it means I’m gonna have to embrace some things that I don’t really particularly like. (iRunFar)
The crazy One Water Race is happening right now. And if you don’t know what it is, well, it’s the hardest race you’ve never heard of. (Youtube/Triathlonish)
For all of you numbers people: Jakob Ingebrigtsen’s data from his 5,000m Olympic win. (COROS)
And, were the repechage rounds at the Olympics a “success?” I’d add that in terms of success and creating more for fans to watch, that’s not what track needed on-the-ground in its sessions; it needed condensed excitement, not a protracted mid. (LetsRun)
One last thing from Paris: AP photographers picked their best pics. (Associated Press)
One last thing
Warning: vomit in this video. Because Kristian Blummenfelt is a legend.
