You raise a valid point, the only other incentive I would see is him not being picked next year and risk loosing his appearance fee in 2023 if he really has jogged it in this year as well as last year (hypothetically). And getting the top 4 in Europe currently is not an easy thing to achieve for the automatic invite.

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Tridad

Whether you like them or not the guys on triathlon mockery alluded to some rumours about athletes not giving it their all. Their point of view is that there are many athletes out there who would have given it their all and not just made up the numbers for the appearance fee.

yeah, true - you do want to keep trying hard enough to get picked.

and i'm not suggesting the athletes are lazy or insincere or anything. i guess i just think, if i'm being mercenary about it, that if i'm an athlete with a very crowded calendar and with some big specific goals . . . i'd be training right through collins cup. by all means i'd want to show up and do my best, out a sense of pride in my racing and ego, for sure, but i'm not going to compromise my A-race by throwing off my training plan to build and taper for the collins cup.

looking at people like lange, phillip, matthews, duffy . . . i'm wondering if that is part of what's at play here.

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

well the smart people did enough on the smak talk part side to satisfy the pto ceo and could afford to walk the run and are sure to be picked for next year ......

as for lange its not his run speed but running economy where he is good , he is just not good over halfs.no doubt he puts his eggs in the kona basket but while he is competitive in other irondistacnes races he has never been really competitive over a half .

i agree if i was european collins cup would not be my a race.

but surely none of them are peaking for this really, so they are all in the same boat aren't they in terms of fitness load / fatigue etc?

I cant imagine any of them plan their calendar out to try and win their 1v1v1, I guess some of them just perform better all year round (Lionel, Blu, Iden etc) whereas others might be the sort of person who is unstoppable when 100% ready for a specific race.

I also wonder if the mental side comes in to play with this, you can tell people like Lionel, Blu, Sam Long would kill themselves to try and win no matter the race where as others aren't built like that

Unless Laidlow can make EUR top 5 there is no chance he'll get a Captains' pick next year. He earned selection this year through ranking position (in the mix) plus holding it together on the run at St George and then again at Edmonton (both after great swim-bikes), unlike previous implosions. I judge that the wider angst caused by the chat getting out of hand (mostly because of immature reaction) outweighs the attraction of pulling in views. And next year there'll be other Frenchmen sufficiently competitive to tick the 'La France' box.

Many of the athletes (those KQ anyway) will have been mostly training through. But I think you underestimate the pride and kudos of racing, and racing hard, in the Collins Cup: the team dynamic and motivation.
Lange does seem to underperform more regularly than others, and not just Collins Cup.

We had great expectations of Duffy but she has said 75km in the TT position was no fun for her, combined with the fact that Ryf was again on top form (expect the latter's race will be judged better than Blummenfelt's btw). Philipp (NB speeling) raced well but in a 100km race Gentle is just 'better' (as in Edmonton) and NB Philipp's time ahead of Haug's. Matthews underperformed: Findlay on top of her game (only a minute slower than Ryf on the bike) but Matthews dug out to catch Moench back up for second, 'for the team' glutes or no glutes.
I note that among the winners last time were Laundry, Hering, Salthouse and Matthews. This time not: that's racing for you?
Finally I think that Lopes' fail showed PTO poor judgement (on the back of one seemingly 'draft-legal' race) to select her for a race with no drafting on a TT bike. Luisa Baptista would have been a safer fairer pick while still ticking the South America box.

You are forgetting that there is no incentive or money on the line to race fast at the Collins Cup, but there are point bonuses or a higher percentage of points given at the Collins Cup for end of the year PTO rankings, which in turn IS a large chunk of money so in effect there is incentive to race hard.

Agreed: no direct monetary incentive to race for the win or minimise losses, but serious team dynamic/motivation to do so (unless athlete is entirely self-centred).
The points awarded for Collins Cup will be no more or less than the points awarded for a similar performance in another race. There are no bonuses (unlike at Edmonton and Dallas where points are bumped up by 5% to encourage participation).
Rankings will change to 'last 365 days' (end of year bonus protocol) from the next update as opposed to Collins Cup protocol (which reached back to Daytona 2020).
In WPRO Gentle will (I estimate) jump to #4 ahead of Matthews and Pallant will drop 2 places.

I think Lange knows he can just peak once and he is made for Kona. The norwegians who are also younger, come from ITU and can peak more than once...Lange in a perfect day can win, he´s got experience...IMO, he is favourite no.1 along with Blu and Iden and ahead of Ditlev (0 experience in Hawaii), Brownlee (raced an IM this weekend and its a tough call to peak in October) and Sanders (who might be top 5).

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Spaniard. Sorry for my english for the sensitive ones :P

. That doesn't mean the Collins Cup can't be exciting or more popular with an audience beyond hard-core triathletes.

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What I find interesting about triathlon and viewerships….the biggest audience that triathlon can pull from is AG triathletes…..but there is this weirdness of AG triathlon being so “only about them”.

Take golf- there are millions of weekend hacks that will sit and watch pros plays every weekend. The pro purses have like improved 10 fold since Tiger has arrived 25+ years ago. Yet in triathlon there is this huge stigma/divide between AG and pro out there that many AG’ers couldn’t be bothered to care about anyone else.

So I kinda laugh. The sport of tri actually likely has a huge viewership to pull from just within our own sport- but there seems to be a majority that will never care. They want their medal and then don’t care.

It’s fascinating because I don’t know in what other sports there is this weird angst that people really couldn’t be bothered to care about anything but their own bubble. I’ve never seen this in tennis or golf.

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
-USAT Level II

Just spitballing here, but what about doing it kind of like they used to do the American Triple T? You have essentially 2v2v2 matchups with drafting, support, whatever perfectly legal between teammates, but not between teams. Then you score it in one of two ways depending on what you want to try and accomplish: System A - first goes to the first team that gets both athletes across the line, second to the second team with both across, third obviously same. Or, System B (better in my opinion): Points awarded to athletes individually 1-6, keep bonuses for time gaps or don't, I really don't care either way.

I think that second approach is fun because it adds to the "team" aspect that they are going to great lengths to beat us over the head with just like the first and also adds WAY more tactics in terms of athlete selection pre-match and race tactics during each match. Imagine a scenario where Sam Long has to decide between trying to go chase Laidlow hard and bail on his teammate or hang back and help drag his teammate to a better finish while potentially sacrificing his individual performance. Also, then we can just get Long and Sanders a couple tugboats for the swim by pairing them with better swimmers and we won't have to watch them try not to drown for 25 minutes.

Good 7 minute summary from GTN:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x8Aojh8P4U

I think one thing that will be interesting. I think the PTO wants/insists on driving what I would call artificial bullshit into the matchups. Maybe the numbers back it up, and maybe they don’t. Like I get it, long took this personal. But I also think it was waaaay more contrived bullshit than some real beef. It was very obvious this was all being played up way more than it really needed to be and Long’s reaction made it even more juicy.

But I think the teams and athletes themselves are going to say to not even bring that stuff into the equation in the future. Like if there truly is real beef, cool. But most of time the beefs really haven’t amounted to anything and they all are “good mates” to one another.

So in that aspect I’d like to see CC move to 2 days. Will allow for better viewing of the actual races and I think it allows the 2nd day matches to atleast try and be meaningful.

So yeah I was very vocal that the whole “beef” came across as so contrived and I get it….Long took it very personal. And I guess we can debate how personal or not the trash talk actually was. It just came very much across as totally contrived to get a rise for people to “tune in”.

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
-USAT Level II

What is this legal boost you talk about?

I think he's referencing essentially the 2 man "team time trial" that LS and Long did in the S and B (legal distance of course). Which was going to obviously play out exactly how it did, that was easy to figure out those 2 were going to "work together" vs the out in front S/B of Laidlow.

It would make zero sense for either of those 2 to try and drop the other early in that race. Both would benefit much more by trading pulls and the power of 2 versus trying to “drop” each other.

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
-USAT Level II

I don't particularly like the forced drama either and based on the looks on Ellie Salthouse and Holly Lawrence's faces every one of the million times they asked them about their "feud", neither do the athletes. That's why I think a different and more tactics based format will produce a better end product. I get that personal feuds was the approach that UFC used to get so big, but that's a sport where at the end of the day two people are going to get locked in a cage and beat the hell out of each other. Even the Formula 1 model isn't a great comparison because of the added team drama at play there, plus the added bonus that the speed and close proximity of the racing makes it highly likely that drivers will get in each other's way, leading to bad blood or something exciting happening. Basically, someone getting the rough end of a feud in F1 can end in them literally crashing a $12 million race car at 200 mph; in triathlon it's Sam Laidlow walking through an aid station. The fact that triathlon is a very individual sport that takes place over a large distance with athletes far apart from each other is just going to make it tough to manufacture any meaningful conflict.

As far as driving age grouper interest, I'd say this is again a format problem as well as a broadcast problem. I'd venture a guess that your average MOP age grouper does zero thinking about race tactics or the dynamic decision making that the pros sometimes have to make. That's because when the vast majority of age groupers race, they are focusing on "run your own race, don't worry about everyone else", which is 100% what they should do. If you're MOP or BOP at a 2400 person IM, why on earth would you adjust your race plan based on what anyone else does? To a lot of AG athletes I'm sure there's an assumption that pros do the same thing. After all, shouldn't you just race in whatever manner will get you the fastest time? This format is particularly bad because with only 3 people per race, it CAN quickly devolve into an individual time trial (see the marquee women's race between Ryf, Duffy, and True). Throw in a team dynamic in a 2v2v2 format though, and now you have a more dynamic race, with more complicated tactics, and athletes making decisions that they aren't as used to making which can provide fodder for commentary both during and after the match. Right now a post-race triathlon press conference is akin to watching paint dry. But imagine if instead someone got to ask Sam Long if it was the right decision to bail on his teammate to chase Laidlow, only to come in second to Lionel while his teammate took 5th or 6th because he dropped him on the bike.

You have to read up on the Scandinavians, Mike. First the mix up with the Swedes and now this :)

On the Mens side

Norway: Blu, Iden, Stornes, Horn and Wernersen

Sure, the last 2 are short course racers, but dont forget what happens when these guys have a crack at it at 70.3. Remember when Stornes toed the line in Nice?

Denmark: Ditlev, Bækkegård, Høgenhaug, Tagholt and Madsen

Sweden: Sandør, Svenningsson, Svensson and Nilsson.

Whereas for the girls we have

Norway: Miller, Dale and Løvseth

Sweden: Månsson (Next year she will probably give some of the girls a run for the money), Lisa Norden, Sara Svensk

Denmark: IDK

Based on this weekend I am pretty sure that Blu, Iden, Ditlev, Bækkegård, Stornes and Horn/Høgenhaug would win 5/6 matches. Then they would get it tougher for the females. But isn't that the point? We dont want to know who wins before the race starts. Show me 4 x 12 athletes in the world that would beat my pick and I will stop bringing up Scandinavia :)

What I would like to see is a little bit of both. I think some individual matchups make great sense; even if they result in an ass whoopin I think there are some A racers where you wanna see the mano y mano matchup. I think some “team” matches would work as well to kinda hide the “boringness” of some of the matches. They do that in tennis and golf (who they also molded this adventure after).

I’m just not understanding the mass start but score it 1 v 1 v 1 matchup that some are suggesting. I would think if they go to mass start they’ll just basically xc score it. Making it too complicated imo doesn’t make sense.

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
-USAT Level II

Excellent idea!

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"FTP is a bit 2015, don't you think?" - Gustav Iden

Multiple formats would definitely be cool and add a fun dynamic. Kind of like how the Davis Cup in tennis has both singles and doubles. Maybe you could do four 1v1v1 races and then four "doubles" 2v2v2 races. That way you get those mano a mano a mano matchups but can also add a bit more intrigue into matchups that are just... boring. Europe probably still smashes everyone winning both the men's singles matches plus one of the women's with Blum, Iden, and Ryf, but it could allow for team tactics to even the playing field on guys like Ditlev or Baekkegard, especially if they have Sam Laidlow blowing up as their partner.

I think this would be a good way to mix it up a bit. You could even have it draft legal between teammates but not between teams. This would allow the teammates to be able to work together a bit more which I think would make athlete placement a little more important and thought out. Do you put Blu in the 1v1 to guarantee a win or put him with a weaker teammate in the 2v2 and hope they can work together for a win, etc.

you could have the top qualifiers as 1v1v1 races then the captains picks are added for the doubles so you can have some tactics in picking strengths to best compliment the qualifiers. potential downside is that a strong runner will seldom get a captains pick unless the team is willing to sacrifice a qualifier as domestique which i guess might be appropriate for next day after the singles. tactics would depend on whether the scoring favours all in for the win vs solid places for both team mates.

LOVE the idea of breaking it into these 5 teams BUT is PTO willing to foot the additional costs - they'd need to add about another $350k to the prize purse for the extra 24 athletes (12 women/12 men), plus additional travel/accommodation/meal costs. If that isn't palatable then 3 teams spilt into Commonwealth / USA / Europe (minus GB) is another alternative to lessen the domination by Europe, but it's not as compelling as UK and Scandinavia having their own teams imo.