I struggled with the Rookie of the year noms. You could make the argument that Sodaro was a rookie at the distance, but there were other nominees that I question whether they meet any stretch of the rookie definition (I'm a fan of Kenji Nener's racing, but he's spent a few seasons racing Super League,World Cup, WTCS)... With the nominations that they had, they are far better off calling that category Breakthrough athlete of the year, which is basically how they interpreted the term rookie anyways...

It's kind of interesting, but I think it would be better if they split up the distances and did more athlete awards and scrapped the product awards (shocker, all of the product award winners have sponsorship deals with PTO or SLT...). They could also probably due with a wider voting base for the winners, with a small panel, there's a bigger risk of bias in the outcomes...

Kenji is a super nice guy. And an aggressive racer.

But I don't understand how anyone could classify him as a rookie.
He is more like the definition of a veteran.

https://www.triathlon.org/...ts/39264/kenji_nener

100%. He had a breakthrough year, but that came through years of grinding... Laidlow wasn't a rookie either... Far better to change the category name...

On stage, I explained the challenge of defining "rookie" since it takes years to achieve success in triathlon... even the relative newcomers like Connor Bentley have spent years rising through the ranks of juniors, U23s etc, so we did settle on athletes that were new to a specific distance/competing at a certain level. As noted below, the French translation of the award was "révelation de l'année" which might be translated to "breakthrough"...

As a first year event, there will be learnings to take but all-in-all, I think a combined awards event is good for our sport to celebrate the athletes and brands that are important to the industry.

I'd love to see Ironman jump on board for next year so we can celebrate the Ironman World Champions together in the same place :)

 


Nick - Watching that video and listening to what everyone said - there was one entity missing from the party! :-)

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

Um, no and that makes the event cringe-worthy. Do you think the Oscars have award categories like "best new gaffer tape" or "best fake blood"? Stick to giving awards to the athletes.