- sorry, my comment on failures was not clear. I was thinking more when ITU guys started to go long like IM and initially many did not adjust well (Lessing, Macca, Rasmus amongst others took some practice to get it right......each of those ended up having some impressive IM races). All things being equal i would think any top ITU guy "can" excel at the longer races once they put in the IM specific training, but I do not think a top ITU guy will jump into IM (on ITU training) and dominate like they may expect (Bennett a recent example despite the talk that he just backed it off which I do not think was the case). Takes a bit a practice and training to ride a strong 180k and back it up with a marathon......as many have said before, I equate that to taking a 1500m runner and expecting him to smoke a marathon on his first attempt based on 1500m training.

For the Olympic distance race, it isn't a matter of quartering the marathon and OW 15k swim. It was taken from the longest event on the track (10,000m), and the longest race in the pool (1,500m).

Right, I've heard this before but it's not very good logic. I've given a lot of thought over the years to the appropriate distances. If you look at the training of the top individual sport athletes, the cyclists and swimmers are both going around 5 hrs/day vs at most 2.5 hr/day for runners. Thus I would argue the swim and bike should both be about equal in time and then the run about 1/2 of that. If we stick with the 40 K bike which would be around 50 min for the elite cyclist, then the swim would be 4000 meters to be around 50 min, and the run about 10K so that we would have 4K swim/40K bike/10K run. I think a 4K swim would string guys out enough to minimize drafting on the bike. Again, this would just be for the elite racers, not age groupers.
"Anyone can be who they want to be IF they have the HUNGER and the DRIVE."