Slowman wrote:
anything can happen. it's very possible that ironman 70.3 oceanside might get canceled because of a terrorist attack closing the bike venue (camp pendleton). don't think that can't happen. it happened to me when i put on a race in oceanside. it might've been the USS cole attack that closed the base, i don't remember. i just remember the bike ride being shut down just before the race.
what happened to the tahoe event is, as tahoe goes, rare. yes, it was cold last year. i remember standing on snow and ice, in bare feet, waiting for the gun to go off in september in the mid 80s for the bass lake national championships. nobody complained. this year, a wildfire happened. that can happen. but during the 10 years i lived in tahoe, and ever since (i spend much of my time in the high sierras ever summer, routinely, and i was in truckee a month ago) this is a rare occurrence.
I had a sibling doing the USTS Nationals at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, which at the time was pretty much the defacto age group and pro Olympic Distance Nationals. It was cancelled and rescheduled in the late 1980s, I believe due to a storm or Hurricane, possibly. I think it was scheduled initially for ?September? and then rescheduled later in the fall. Not surprising that these things can/could happen for a September race on the Atlantic ocean.
Arguably, USTS Nationals and IM Hawaii were the two biggest races on the U.S. calendar, so to have one of them cancelled (but ultimately rescheduled), was a pretty big cancellation.