Thank you for listening and the feedback.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

Actually, I found it better (for me) to listen to Messick/Hamburg first, then listen to you guys + Ben

So I'd call that a happy accident vs a f-ing up

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

Replying to you because you asked, but: we're on Apple now. https://podcasts.apple.com/...podcast/id1691441710

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

All due respect to the slow twitch team, but I had to turn the Andrew Messick interview off..

Will for sure tune into other episodes, but can’t stomach his demeanor. Thank you ST for for podcast.

I mean. That's fair. We are just trying to move to conversations forward in a positive directions. Thanks for following.

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E-DUB
Chief Janitor @Slowtwitch
Life is short. Dont be mad all the time.

Thanks. I saw that.

I really enjoyed the Ben K interview. I found you guys brought good balance in the whole discussion.

I enjoyed the Andrew Messick interview much less, but please keep the guests coming :-)

Fair take and we appreciate it!

At some point we’ll be back to not always having a guest…but we’ll keep finding good conversations to have.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

I thought you did very well on the Andrew M interview. IM has policies in place, and you do not throw them out the window because people are mad or that it was on lived TV. He admitted they should have went dark and changed the script, he said they made a mistake. But the idea to bot speak until everyone is notified is a logical position to take. News media and hysterical podcasters can rush to publish whatever they want but an organization that has a critical response protocol in place that follows it is actually being responsible I would have a lot less trust on IM if I felt they were "making shit up as they go".

He admitted there were a lot of lessons learned here, and as tragic as this is, it is still an accident

Baffling everyone's fallen for this distraction orchestrated by Messick and the slowtwitch hosts. The outrage is not about poor crisis communication strategy. It's about the causes of the accident and what will be done to prevent it happening again. Someone bloody died. Get real!

i guess at this stage everybody understands that slowtwich is not going to ask the hard questions. at the same time eric did make a few good points.
its not black or white at the end of the day this is the only course the city of hamburg did give permission for

Give me 3 questions I should have asked..

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E-DUB
Chief Janitor @Slowtwitch
Life is short. Dont be mad all the time.

I'll bite: here's four.
Given Ironman want to allow fair racing, do you acknowledge that a concentration of motos accompanying the front pack gives those riders a significant and unfair advantage over the slower swimmers chasing from behind?

The first Ironman statement said "Our priority always is ensuring the safety of our participants and those involved in the event." A clear understanding of the hazards by athletes can only enhance the event's safety. Given this priority, will you publish or share the Risk Assessment (RA) signed off for IM Hamburg or failing that (for legal reasons), publish a RA before each IM organised race, in future?

You say "unequivocally" that the moto plan was safe, that IM Hamburg believed that they didn’t have too many motos, and that there were going to be more motos than we’ve typically had. How many more motos do you think IM could have allowed while still keeping the race safe? Does Ironman keep a record of how many motos are accredited for each race as an element of its managed process?

What lessons have been identified from previous serious competitor v motor vehicle incidents in race in the last few years and what changes have been made in order to learn those lessons?

May I suggest you listen to the Joe Skipper interview in this week's MX endurance podcast. His opinions on a few of these as well as another question for Messick: will IM WC in Nice be open roads ?.Joe says yes.

I'll bite with a couple of responses.

First, let me be unequivocally clear -- Andrew was alerted to the topic of the conversation (as is custom with literally any interview ever set up through a comms or PR department) but we were in control of the conversation direction and the questions being asked. I've seen that a few times on social media and figured I'd clear that one up.

Also, just from a process standpoint: we recorded our episode with Ben Kanute earlier in the same day. Because we'd covered a lot of the same ground, and in the interest of not repeating myself and making the Kanute episode redundant, I decided to be more focused on the specific facts and processes that transpired in Hamburg. The question I missed getting out was about the process of media credentialing and how people request a Moto, and if Moto requests are ever denied. That's on me. That said, you can hear my opinion on how many motos there were in the immediately preceding footage to the crash in the Kanute episode.

Now to your questions:

1.) I'm almost positive that I'm going to get a response similar to the one Rory McIlroy received in the PGA meeting this week from the guy ranked like 250 in the world, but here goes: as Simon Whitfield said in our episode a couple weeks back -- if you don't want to leave it up to discretion, just get faster. If you're missing the "train" because you swam slow...them's the breaks.

This goes back to whether or not or sport is worthy of broadcasting. Broadcasting is going to mean motos. And sometimes that's going to mean a fair number of them. You can't do broadcasting with drones (Susan Lacke put together a good piece in Triathlete about this, and we covered it off with Kanute too).

2.) That's a better question for an RD, but, in my experience from a legal standpoint I think it'd be hard to find any RD that would publish that anywhere.

3.) See above -- this is the question I wished I'd asked that I didn't. Fair criticism. In my humble opinion, too many motos for that section of the course -- whether or not that's too many motos period, that might change base on how the race develops. But I would be fine with the Roth plan going forward of the only motos on course being live broadcast and race officials. Photogs are being shuttled to certain places and that's about it; or the media pool needs to be deeper. (Or you charge for moto access in the future...which I'm not opposed to, either).

4.) I thought he tapped into this. Or maybe that was the Kanute episode where we talked about it.

Appreciate the feedback. I think *maybe* we should have recorded a bridge to have both conversations in one, because I think together they paint a clearer picture when you hear them together. I didn't want to cover the same territory twice, and in hindsight that might be the key source of where the disconnect is.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

I think it is great you got Andrew on so soon after the crash, but you were never going to get much in the way of an honest response regarding questions directly related to the accident. Unlike Trump, he is too smart to paint himself into a legal corner with the media, so all of his answers were with that in mind.

It was good to have him tell about the failure of the live broadcast, but once again, this was something entirely new and there just wasn't a plan in place. He was honest there as this has no real bearing on the actual accident. The place where I wish you could have pushed him, was after you asked about the number of motos. He stood his ground(as I would expect) and he should have. There weren't too many motos for the race, but there were waaaay too many for that lead group. That is what I was hoping you would have asked, did he think that many on the leaders was the right number? I doubt you would have gotten an honest answer there too, but at least it would have been put out there.

Listen, we all saw what happened and what was going on that lead group, and I dont think anyone thinks that was the right number of motos in this part of the race. The real problem was that "all' of the media wanted the same thing, a front row seat to the Frondeno show. This is where there was a big failure, there should have been a Marshall in charge to make sure that dynamic did not happen. Every single rider had their own personal draft vehicle, and because of the congestion, there was really no way for them to move out of those spots, so it looks like they just became static.

I'm all for putting on a production, and of course there is going to be some limited advantage to those in the camera sights, but it should be "limited". This was a gross perversion of that dynamic, and going forward the lead Marshall should be in charge of making sure it doesnt happen again. 80% of those motos should have been spread through out the field, but they had no direction, so just forced their ways into the Jan group.

And I'm kind of with Simon here, you want to win races, then swim fast enough to get to the front. But this was not normal, and if you are a Sam Long, this would have been a race killer for him. And I would side with that feeling of helplessness to move up no matter how hard you rode, it was not a fair race whatsoever for anyone not in that group.

But as I said, you were never going to get an answer that was outside of the we did everything right, but sometimes bad shit happens. And of course this was a failure of one individual, who paid the ultimate price for that decision to pass on the wrong side. But the real failure was the fact that in order to pass, he had to go around that huge peloton of motos, and that was the match that lit the fire that burned down the house.

And keep the guests coming guys, the two of you should be the odd show out, not the normal week to week one.. (-;

The question about triathlon being a broadcast sport or not is particularly salient.

There is a narrow section on the Alcatraz run course where you have to give way to the runner coming down the mountain. In 2014 I had to get out of the way for Andy Potts!

It used to be you only get that experience of you sign up for the race. I’ve watch IM Texas for the last two years and thought about signing up again. But we are creatures of habit. I’ll probably swim 3800 at the Dads Club that morning and compare notes just like the last two years.

I felt the same about the Messik interview. He came off very tone deaf. He seemed more worried about his image and defending Ironman, than the accident itself.

I will give him a pass, because I doubt if he could really say that much at this present time.

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

Of course. In every public image crisis, the main conflict is between the PR department and the legal department.

In Ironman, expecting the PR department to win would be like expecting Cameroon to beat Norway in cross country skiing.

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

Going forward - should there be a dedicated thread for each episode, and save this one for "long time/first time" comments? #yourock #yousuck

So far, def on my "it's here!" list as you're the most consistent (every Thursday) as well as the shortest lag time = when you say 'last week' it WAS last week; vs some podcasts that say "I'm doing 'such&such' in a couple weeks" but those results are 2 weeks old, by the time they drop

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

Not a bad idea. We’ve also thought about occasionally crowd sourcing some questions in advance of certain guests—which your thread idea would solve for.

We will definitely alert when we’re pre-recording well in advance of air date. Timeliness is key to a lot of our conversations and so us recording on Tuesday to release Thursday is about as far apart as I’m comfortable with for non-evergreen content.

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

I'm on travel and a little behind, but just listened to the SW episode. Really good, entertaining, lots of insight and description of his transition from the complete devotion to pro triathlon to engaging in a more varied set of activities. Well worth the time to listen.

Yeah, that seemed to me to be a typical Messick approach/interview/discussion. Not much the ST hosts could have really done to get more useful information. He is so slippery, Messick must bathe in hot wax daily. Which is not a criticism - he made some good points and could not be pinned down on a few of the more controversial points. It's his job to do that.

Thanks for the feedback on both episodes!

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Editor-in-Chief, Slowtwitch.com | Twitter

I just want to say I’ve listened to several episodes and I can’t really pin down why I find them interesting. Maybe it’s the insight into past events - pre-2016 years are ancient times to me, triathlon wise.

In terms of what could be improved, unless you guys speak a bit faster, I’ll have to turn up playback speed (which I don’t normally do).

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