In a previous thread about the Toronto Triathlon Festival, I just read the following in a post from DuDooD :
"... but the volunteers did an excellent job pointing out duathletes and making sure they hit the turnaround. "

I believe my answer to this little point deserves a new thread.

I was in the TTF duathlon yesterday and I don't have the same experience at all.
For many different reasons this was by far the worst organization I ever witnessed in a multisport event (they have so much to learn from multisport canada or others...). But this topic could be left for another pretty packed post.

For now, back to the turnaround. The fact is that for the 10-15 athletes who exited T2 first, there was no volunteer standing at the turnaround, whereas the sign posted there read "Sprint turnaround". I was expecting something like "Duathlon turnaround" so I ran further away. At the end of the day I ran another 10k instead of 5, too afraid of missing a time mat and being accused of cheating. Later the organizers were informed of the confusion and asked a volunteer to stand there and yell at duathletes.

You could argue that I'm just stupid, and there's probably some truth in that statement. But the funny thing is that I was far from being the only one concerned by this bug. Actually 5 to 7 people, including the winner and the second overall, ran between 8 and 10k instead of 5. At the finish line all of us talked to the race referee, who was for sure embarrassed. She explained that for people who ran too far and complained, there would be time readjustments. Which means that they would look at the times for the first run and the ride, and then infer a possible time for the second run... A process which can only result in unfairness for everybody. But well, that was it.

The results took forever to be posted. When they finally were, I found my time not readjusted at all, which is pretty frustrating. I argued my case to the race referee after the results were posted but she didn't seem concerned. I then sent emails but still got no reply. I don't know if i'm the only one in that case.

Anyways i'm not here to complain about my own situation. What I want to question is the overall organization of the race and the validity of the results. For those who had the privilege of having their time readjusted, the inferred times did not always represent fairly their real performance. For instance it's well known amongst top canadian duathletes that the guys who ended up 1st and 2nd routinely run sub 18:30 5k in their last leg. Their inferred time was 20-21min which is ridiculous. In that precise case this does not modify the overall ranking. But in other cases this does. For instance the guy who officially finished 5th was inferred a time way below his capacities, and without the turnaround bug he may or may not have made 4th. (side note : i don't cite names directly. I'm new to the slowtwich forum and am not sure that apart from simon whitfield, lance armstrong, chrissie wellington and so on, names are welcome...)

So yep. I wouldn't call the TTF Duathlon a successfully organized event ! This was supposed to be the national champs and we end up with a top 15 that has been put together more or less randomly. This is a real shame!

After reading the previous thread about the TTF, it turns out that people mostly enjoyed it and found it ran smoothly. Am I the only grumpy person here ??