good question. First of all, can you tell I should be working, I've responded to about 4 threads now ;-)

I think in this specific example (because we have only had one Olympic triathlon) Simon has managed to milk his gold medal for a lot, kudos to him. I think it really helps that his performances have continued to be top notch since the Olympics.

For pro's like Simon and Peter, there is a lot more than prize money that make up their total income, performance bonus' can be quite high for performing at the right time and place so who knows how much the Olympic gold is worth compared to a Hawaii ring. For someone that is a proven commodity such as Peter, I would think that he has quite a bit riding on the line in performance bonus' when he jumps in the water, as will Simon in Athens next year. There is only one gold medal awarded every 4 years as opposed to a Hawaii championship ring every year. Personally, it is a toss up as to which I would prefer to have in my own collection.

---

Mike Plumb, TriPower MultiSports
Professional Running, Cycling and Multisport Coaching, F.I.S.T. Certified
http://www.tripower.org

Good points Mike. It does seem that the US triathlon scene is more focused on IM where as the rest of the world, for the most part, has a greater focus on olympic talent development. Canada focuses more of their performance dollars on Olympic athletes, some EU countries support only olympic distance athletes with money.
The US tri media/magazines IMO are focused on IM racing. ITU races occur almost weekly sometimes several on the same weekend where as IM races are often spaced apart. In this case it seems that more in not better for in depth coverage.
Another reason might be the US's relatively slow embracing of ITU style racing compared to the rest of the world. In most of the world younger talent grows up wanting to race the ITU races. In the US IMO many young athletes do not take the time to develop the swim and foot speed to race ITU. After 2 years they think about moving up in distance. Some of my Canadian friends have taken a 4-6 year plan to break into the ITU ranks. Most of the world also offes more ITU style racing for the U23's than possible in the US.

---

Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

In America I think we equate difficulty with length or distance. I have observed a lot of people who start tri's and within a year or two are already jumping into Ironman distance racing. Why? Because no one cares what your time is if you finish one. All you have to say is that you finished an Ironman and people will go "ooooooh" and think you are cool. You don't get that with other distances.

I am very competitive and have no desire to race an Ironman for years until I have enough training volume to justify the entry fee. Slowman talked about this a while back in a story he called "Ladder Climbers" or something similar. My goal when I came into triathlon was to break two hours at Olympic distance. It turned out to be much harder than I thought and those six minutes I need to cut to get there are going to require some huge dedication. When I finally do it, it will mean a great deal to me, but not to anyone else I know (except maybe my wife and friends), because they don't know what a sub-two hour Olympic distance means. Frankly, I don't care, but I think it explains why Ironman is so popular in the U.S. It is the only thing people see and recognize as triathlon. Many people first view of the sport comes from seeing IM Hawaii on TV.

To them, IM Hawaii is triathlon.

"All you have to say is that you finished an Ironman and people will go "ooooooh" and think you are cool. You don't get that with other distances.......have no desire to race an Ironman "

It's refreshing to hear that there is at least one other tri person that feels the same way I do. I had a sprinter's background, a body full of fast twitch fibres and love to go balls out on the bike. Consequently I love sprints and have absolutely no desire to do an IM, despite my wife's constant nagging that we should. I just can't see a thrill in myself lob-dee-dobbing along at survival pace to say I finished one of these things in under 17 hrs. Nor can I see myself training for a whole year for just one race. After three years in this sport I'm starting to get sprint AG podium finishes. Plus I get to participate in a half dozen or more events in a short cold climate season. Hey, I'm having way too much fun with sprints to want to do anything else.

I hear all kinds of beginner triathletes saying after only a few sprint tris under their belts that they want to do an IM, usually just to say that they finished one. When I respond that I have no interest in IM length races, they tend to dismiss me as not being a genuine trigeek.

Besides at 52, I'm still way too young to do an IM. I'll wait until I'm over 70 because I understand after that age it's a lot easier to get into IM Hawaii.

You and Mike are correct. The four things that have made the Ironman distance numero uno are:
1. NBC tv coverage
2. Julie Moss
3. WTC's marketing of the m-dot logo.
4. 17 hour cutoff for finisher. (If TdF allowed 17 hrs to finish each stage, a team of any 6 people on this forum could reach Paris).
It was pretty cool, in the olden days, when Bud Light promoted the USTS series. Did a lot to showcase Scott Molina.

Bob Sigerson

Those two are hard to compare as there are thousands of people who do the Ironman or similar distance race a year, and 6 who get the Olympic experience every 4 years. My druthers
1.Win Olympic medal vs Win Ironman. Olympics
2. Make Olympic team not medal , win Ironman Ironman 3 .Make Olympic team not medal, top 20 Ironman . Olympics
4. Almost make Olympic team, under 100 place Ironman EVEN

Yesterday I was looking at the ITU long distance rankings and I didnt recognize most of the top names, but yet I do recognize most of the Pro Ironman Hawaii Finishers. I am more interested in following IM races and US nondrafting races than ITU races. As far as Im concerned Walton, Macca and Lessing are top Intl distance races and Barb Linquist is tops at both. And as American I would rather see Walton or Lessing win Gold than Kemper. Kemper doesnt do the non drafting american races. I think Kona is what started the sport and is still the pinnacle.

---

-----------------------:)
SUPPORT OPERATION REBOUND:
http://www.operationreboundcalifornia.kintera.org/ejs3

Kestrel Syndicate
Macca Fan Club

From the media angle - there is no comparison really. The Olympics is so much bigger in so many different ways. In Canada we have been able to compare this directlybecause we have bee so lucky to have had the success of Simon Whitfield at the Olympic Games and Peter Reid and Lori Bowden at Ironman to celebrate

The day after Simon won the Olympic Gold medal his picture was on the front page( The Front Page not just the front page of the sports) of every major news paper in Canada and many others around the world. The event had been aired live on network televison in North America and around the world. What impact does this have? People who knew nothing about triathlon now knew Simon and knew that he came from Canada. In my Dog walking group, I played fly-on-the-wall a few days after the big win, and these people who did not have a clue about triathlon before, were now talking about Simon as if he lived down the street!!

All this being said, Ironman has also had a very big media impact, but not in the traditional way. The news of Peter and Lori's great wins at Ironman Hawaii are strangley, often buried in the back of the sports section. Despite that, Ironman has reached it's way into the concious of many. For many it's the only triathlon that they know about. It's like the marathon in running. When you say that you have done an Ironman to someone who knows liitle about the sport, their eyes really light up.

---

---

Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

>>From the media angle - there is no comparison really. The Olympics is so much bigger in so many different ways.<<

Yes, but triathlon is just a small drop in the Olympics bucket. Track, swimming and gymnastics are so much bigger. I remember after the Sydney Olympics, non-triathlete people asked me if I saw the triathlon on TV and asked me why it "wasn't like the one in Hawaii." I actually didn't see the tri coverage since I didn't really care. The only reason I follow ITU style racing is to follow the guys of Team Kinesys.

---

clm
Nashville, TN
https://twitter.com/ironclm | http://ironclm.typepad.com

Cathy,

I agree with you to a certain degree. Athletics, swimming, Gymnatics and a few others are the marquee sports of the Olympic Games. However, triathlon had a remarkable debut in Sydney and I suspect has jumped way up the list of Olympic sports in terms of profile with just one games under it's belt.

I feel sorry for you living in the USA. NBC treats the summer Olympic games like a giant Gymnastics meet( and the winter Olympic Games like a giant figure skating competition). In fact, watching the NBC coverage, one would think gymnastics is the only sport being contested at the Games. Thankfully, the rest of the world, gets a far more balanced approach to the coverage with decent coverage of most/all sports. We saw both triathlons live in Canada on the CBC from start to finish! Same with the marathons and many of the longer running events on the track and swimming in the pool.

---

---

Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

This is how everything looked to me here in Toronto

Simon Whitfield - Front page of newspaper, lead of every major news program and sports channel. Media still follows with articles in newspaper.

Peter Reid - only able to find in paper if looking for it - I couldn't even find it in the boxscores of the National Post. No mention on news.

My perspective. I think I can become a fast olympic distance age grouper but I am not going to ever be a great long distance guy (don't have durable enough knees). However, I want to try and do Hawaii once - to prove to myself I can do it. My experience with the average person (non-triathlete, non sports fanatic) is that they don't know the difference between the two distances. A triathlon to them means you have done the ironman distance. Amateur or individual pro sports only get significant attention here during the Olympics.

---

____________________________________________

"which is like watching one of your buddies announce that he's quitting booze and cigarettes, switching to a Vegan diet and training for triathalons ... but he's going to keep snorting heroin." Bill Simmons, ESPN

Bob and others.

Having done 11 Ironmans and countless Olympic distance events dating back to 1985 (yeah and the Molina USTS winning streak was mightly cool), I have to say in general, people in and out of our sport have very little respect for any distance short of an Ironman (expect in the Olympics). Personally, I have achieved my lifelong OD tri goal of going 1:59 back in 1994 and have been trying to break 10 hour for the Ironman for the past decade. The closest I've been in 10:25...oh well. I still think going fast at Olympic is way tougher than completing an Ironman, but going fast at Ironman for an age grouper with other life responsibilities is way tougher than going fast in OD.



Addressing your issue of the 17 hour cutoff. Now if you can swim in 1:20 and bike 6:40, which the large majority of the field can do, you start the run at 8 hours even. That gives you a full 9 hours to walk the Ironman run and at 4.5 k/h you get to the finish under the wire if you can pull off a final mile shuffle in around 10 min (the 4:22 Ironman shuffle pace). Over dinner the other day, a couple of us had a thought. Ironman is supposed to be a swim-bike-run triathlon, not a swim-bike-run-walk quadrathlon. What if they instituted a rule that is the inverse of race walking...i.e. you are not allowed to walk, only run. The only "walk legal zones" would be every mile at the aid station marked by a white line on the ground. Once at the aid station, you could walk, rest, replenish etc, but once outside the "markers" run or you're DQ'd. Now that would make Ironman interesting. I bet you the average time would come down, but you would not lose that many finishers aside from medical issues. I feel that most people just "give in mentally" and start to walk rather than maintain a shuffle.

Out of 11 Ironmans, I've only walked once outside the aid stations, and that was this year, overloaded with 10 lbs of hyponatremic liquid in my body...but that is another story altogether :-). I really believe that running the whole marathon is within reach of most entrants.

Oh yeah, please DQ anyone who crawls (i.e. Julie Moss, Sean Welch, Wendy Ingraham). I can't believe people get inspired to do tris watching that stuff. I'd rather get inspired watching Lori pull off another sub 3 hour marathon or Hellriegel coming off the bike 13 min ahead of Mark Allen in sub 4:30.

Which gets more attention in the States, Oly distance or IM...? Hmm...let me think...

Who's this "Whitfield" guy you mention, anyway? I'm drawing a blank.

Hey Cerveloguy, those over 70 groups can get pretty tough for Kona spots too. At Florida last weekend 1st place was 16:15:55, 2nd was 16:16:17 and 3rd was 6:16:51. How is that for a shootout over a long day for that single slot?

I myself, was given a great deal more slowtwitch fibre so racing sprints and Olympics (which I did for 10 years before doing my first ironman) was fun but I knew I'd do better moving up in the distances. As for which one holds more prestige, I think that in Canada where I live Simon Whitfield is definitely more widely known than Peter, Lori, Heather or Lisa so you could argue that Olympic distance racing may have more prestige. However, I have notived that the overall quality of fields for shorter races has diminshed and more of the competitive triathletes that I have raced in years past (in Ontario anyway) have been moving up and racing long course triathlons (not always ironman but the most competitive race in Ontario, imo, is the Muskoka Tri long course which is 2k - 55k -15k).

"those over 70 groups can get pretty tough for Kona spots too. At Florida last weekend 1st place was 16:15:55, 2nd was 16:16:17 and 3rd was 6:16:51. How is that for a shootout over a long day for that single slot? "

That's absolutely amazing. Probably one of the closest races. All this time I've sort of put IM into the same catagory as golf. Something I'd save for my retirement years before trying. My main sports are scuba and cycling. As long as my body isn't to frail to lift a scuba tank or turn a crankset, I expect to be doing these well into old age.