And what about the athlete who wins the first race of the series? Under that rule they can just be top of the standings all year without ever racing again, or joint first if somebody wins their first race later on in the season.

I don't see any problem with that. The number of individuals who win ITU events is remarkably few, especially in the mens event. If someone wins the first event and then doesn't race they are not getting an advantage and not disadvantaging the next person.

The only scenario were that is likely to happen is if one of the top five athletes gets injured after the first race. It is very unlikely a random guy wins the first race then gets injured and doesn't compete, if he we wins the first and then comes lower down in the next the positions adjust appropriately.

Better than celebrating someone who happens to be at the top by mathematical fluke

I don't see how coming 2nd or 3rd consistently would mean that you were top/near top by mathematical fluke.

A simpler solution to all of this would be to have the points from races trail off more steeply. I.e. make a win more valuable in relation to 2nd place, 2nd place more valuable in relation to 3rd etc.

The distribution of ranking points is designed to create artificial excitement rather than a fair reflection.

Gomez won the 2013 world championship going into the last race with one win, two seconds and a third. Jonny Brownlee had three wins and one second. And the "extra points" final when Gomez won that final sprint meant he was world champion, whereas Jonny had the better year. By the same token, Gomez had clearly the best season last year and yet had Jonny (who didn't) won the last event and Gomez finish outside the top 5, he would have won. Quite unjustly...

I can't work out why Murray is now 4th (he's had a 3rd, a 4th, and two 5ths) while Alistair B is 5th despite 2 wins and a 2nds, and Jonny B 7th, despite 2 wins and a 5th...

But it is only numbers on a board! But need to be taken with a pinch of salt some times.

I am not so sure.
The system may encourage athletes to "play it safe" to optimise overall points and therefore final position rather than take risks. Barrie Shepley criticised Dodds for taking it out too hard on the run and ending up with fewer points than he should have if he had been less adventurous. To make the sport interesting to viewers it needs athletes to take risks, push boundaries, try things and fail, the current system discourages that and encourages athletes to train safe (less injuries), race safe (more points) and conform to the pack tactics.

The perfect example of this is the women, Gwen is so dominant that the female racing is boring. We need to have some excitement, some uncertainty, something to speculate about, some youngsters actually trying to break away on he bike, at the moment all except Gwen appear to be trying to optimise points against each other rather challenge Gwen and risk loosing points relative to each other.

I think I agree with Liaman. A win is such a rare thing for the vast majority of ITU athletes it needs to be made far more precious and attract far greater points. Same applies to podiums

One possible way to incite this kind of racing aggression throughout the race would be to offer a modest amount of points (250? More?) to the first athlete into each transition. Make each discipline almost a race in itself.
To avoid flat out bunch sprints into T2, you could do it as an intermediate sprint about 500m before you dismount.

They used to do that kind of thing and it didn't work. Some athletes were only in the race for the primes.

Riddle me this ITU experts: Nearly every prediction of how this race would go was that we would see a huge pack at the front making the bike somewhat negligible. Yet in both the men's and women's races we saw relatively small (8-10) groups off the front that, with the possible exception of Jorgensen probably could have run through the group from the chase pack, made the race.

What was missed in the analysis that happened on race day to allow these packs to form? What can ITU do to make the races like this more in the future? Honestly, that was some of the most exciting biking in a race we have seen to date. I was riveted to see if those chase groups were going to catch the leaders. (Well, more so on the women's. On the men's we all had to keep watching Johnny B. try and pull the stragglers up. I get why that's compelling, but certainly by the end of lap 2 we should have started to get coverage of the chase group.)

I suspect that either Dodds got a bit too excited or decided that 30-60 seconds at the front of the race wouldn't hurt his media exposure. In AB words they took the first k out really fast and then stopped!

Sorry but a small group of 15 athletes will be always expected when you will have Alistair Brownlee (healthy) AND Richard Varga on the starting line.

Almost all the race in 2014 saw a formation of 15 athletes in the front pack.
The golden rule in ITU is 20s. If you exit T1 with a bigger deficit, it's impossible to come back alone and you will be in the second group.

2015 is a special year, NFs force athletes to concentrate their energy on the olympics selections = second part of the season.

For Johny Brownlee... well BBC might be the only one national tv covering the race live... I can understand why they were focusing on him...

I'm sorry to say this, but there is no such thing with media exposure in ITU. Maybe Dodds needs to be aggressive because he needs a podium to get his olympic selection. Andrea Hewitt is already selected...

If you are interested, we did a interview after race with Vincent Luis in French... he explain really well the run strategy. We need to accept that more athlete are able to run the first k in 2:40. It's now a compulsory move...

http://www.trimes.org/...es-jamais-sans-luis/

They did something like this in the past... ITU offer a bonus (cash) for a small group (max 6 or 8) entering T2 first... I think it was 3 years ago, when Specialized was an ITU sponsors. Reality is, no one is going to go faster on the bike if they can't run after. .

I just think week after week the thing that shouts out to me is just how bloody important the swim is. And not just your ability to swim the whole distance fast, but your ability to swim the distance to the first buoy fast. Gwen's biking has improved for sure, but it is her ability to swim with the fast girls now that is getting her in the front pack. Go back and watch the swim in the Gold Coast race, you'll see Johnny make a decisive move in the 2nd lap that created the opportunity on the bike. Similarly, check out Ali's starting position at Cape Town at the wrong end of the pier and think about how hard he had to swim to still be near the front at the turn, he was on his arse all round that bike leg but he was in the right pack at least. Then check out Mola's weekend in London...

Also, Johnny said in post race interview that the replacement back wheel was rubbing a bit, and the BBC commentators wondered the same thing. I wonder if he didn't try reaching back and opening up the quick release on the back brake, I've had to do that in a race before, worth practicing!

It's not how many races you do.

Only the top five results count w the Grand Finale being worth more points

For Johny, the back brake is under the bottom bracket...

For the Swim, yes, the first boy is really a priority. The London swim course is really compact, so the first buoy push the athletes to follow an direct line. When ITU is using a U Turn with 3 or 4 buoy, there are less fights...

The best swimmers general prefer to be in interior, at Cape Town, Alistair didn't have the luxury to choose in the firsts his spots (based on ranking). Whatever your position, you need to swim really hard to the first boyd. You can place Varga, Schoeman, Raphael anywhere and they will be the first...

For Gold Coast, the swim was special (current).

There is some wayward analysis of the points system in this thread.

A points system will always be arbitrary but contrary to what people have been saying the current points system actually rewards aggressive racing, as I will now lay out:

Theoretically the most basic form of a points system would be one which is completely proportional to the positions achieved, so for instance it could work as totalling the athletes 6 races and whoever has the lowest sum result wins the series (i.e 1+1+1+1+1+1 = 6).

You could also produce the exact same method of this system by capping the number of entrants at each race at say 65, and then award 65 points to the winner of eace race, 64 to second and so on. Therefore by the end of the series taking an athlete's best 6 races would hypothetically see the winner of the series achieving 65+65+65+65+65+65=390).

Now the important thing to recognise here is that the difference between each result in a race is completely proportional.

Therefore, using the first method the following results would be equal:

assuming the series is 3 races long for simplicity: Athlete A comes 1st, 1st and 3rd and therefore achieves a total of 5. Athlete B comes 2nd, 2nd and 1st and therefore achieves a total of 5. We therefore see that in a completely proportional system there is no weight placed on higher results. This will hold true for any combination of results, i.e 4,4,6 would be the same as 5,5,4).

The points system the series uses at the moment however avoids this because the points assigned to each result decrease proportionally as you go down from 1st.

I.e the gap between 1st and 2nd is larger than the gap between 2nd and 3rd. And so on, so the gap between 10th and 11th is bigger than between 11th and 12th. The ONLY affect this can have is to reward aggressive racing and encourage finishing as high as you can.

Consequently 1,1,3 becomes 800+800+685=2285. 1,2,2 becomes 800+740+740=2280. Clearly 2285>2280 and therefore the athlete who finished 1st twice would win the overall series.

Of course the fact that the Grand Final award 1.5x points does throw an additional dynamic into play. But of course it is the Grand Final for a reason and that's why it's the biggest race of the season.

Because the points for coming 5th are a lot more than the points difference between the top 5 places. So the fact that Murray's points total comes from 4 races outweighs his lower finishing places in those races, when compared to the Brownlees who have a higher finishing average but only 3 races. Rankings only really become relevant when everybody has 5 races in the bag.

Only seen the mens, but it was pretty static on the bike - the gaps came from the swim. There were no breaks on the bike, as usual, gaps pretty much stayed the same.

I think you miss the point. We, I am saying the gap between 1st and 2nd may be bigger than 2nd and 3rd but it is still not big enough a differential to encourage taking a risk because if you take a risk and finish 1st you should be handsomely rewarded - exciting racing, however if you take a risk there is the chance you will end up 20th rather than 10th.

Firstly if you look at the prize money payout you'll see it MASSIVELY encourages racing hard:

$18000, $12000, $8000, $6000, $4900...diminishing to $1000 for 20th. That is an absolutely instrumental factor.

The prize money payout is far more like an exponential function...is that what you want for points too?

Do you want say 800 for first, 600 for second, 450 for third, 380 for forth?

Yes, very much so. I think it is needed to encourage risk and exciting racing

Fair, yeah I do agree it could be shifted more that way.

On the subject of marathon running and ITU, didn't Steffen Justus do a 2.13 marathon or something?

Also are Henri Schoemann and Roland Schoemann really related? Henri walked past me at the Auckland event and he is tiny...altho I am not sure how big Roland is, his sprint swimming pedigree suggests he isn't too small...

Breaking news!!!

Finally, the Rio bike course has been published.

http://www.triathlon.org/.../rio_bike_course.jpg

I've been talking about the course for ages on these forums because I was given the route details unofficially. And I've had a nagging worry that I've been misleading people! But no, the course now published on triathlon.org is exactly the one I was told about.

Check out the google map:

https://www.google.co.uk/...9:0x1da40f6562d53001

After the swim, they exit T1 south along the Copacabana, then do a 180 and back north until Rua Djalma Ullrich. If you check street view, more more importantly, the altitude (I used this: http://www.mapcoordinates.net/en) you will see that the route rises from 14 to 65 meters, so 50 meters of climbing. There is then a treacherous 10 to 15% technical descent (rua Professor Gastao Bahiana), then a 2nd climb which by my calculation is another 40 meters in 300 (well over 10%). So 90 meters of climbing which is 40 more than Auckland or Madrid. The descent down R Miguel Lemos is relatively straight forward. Then they go left at the bottom parallel to the sea.

This is just one loop, and the whole course is repeated 8 times! Which means 16 climbs, and very tired legs.

Please feel free to check my calculations regarding the amount of climbing, I don't know how reliable the mapcoordinates app is. Also, if anyone here from Brazil would like to have a look (or knows it), would be great to hear.

Either way, I think these two climbs are going to have the field broken to pieces. And if there is any possibility of beating Gwen Jorgensen, then perhaps that technical descent might give her the heeby-jeebies (would be fun to see Nicolas Spirig diving down it!)

Thoughts?