I live in the US, currently near Boulder and soon to be Boston, and have no interest in racing Ironmans, but draft legal racing has a strong appeal for me, I come from a bike racing background. The closet analogous discipline I can find is Xterra, which is where my focus is. However, as far as I can tell, there is little draft legal racing in the US.
How do people get involved in it? How does USAT even come up with an American Olympic team without draft legal race series to support a development pipeline or is this a case of finding talented swimmers/runners and shipping them to Europe to develop? I have no delusions about racing for Olympic Gold, but I would like to race some true Olympic events!
EDIT: I just did a search on TeamUSA, which is tied to USAT, and found 11 draft legal events in the US. Not exactly a lot to choose from…
Not only are there few draft legal events, many of these have age restrictions (under 25, collegiate, junior, etc.) There is a draft-legal race series for Juniors, and I believe USAT uses these races to select athletes for Olympic pruning.
There’s unfortunately just not much draft legal racing in the US, especially for older adults
A teammate of mine is planning on going the draft legal route. He’s racing Clermont this year, hoping to grab a pro card there and then do Conti cup races.
You may need to get the drafting qualifications from a qualified whatever coach to get into draft legal racing. It is required in some races. I think we had a bunch of athletes get qualified here in Canada for draft legal before racing Clermont and Sarasota. It was required in Quebec for a while not sure about it now.
You may need to get the drafting qualifications from a qualified whatever coach to get into draft legal racing. It is required in some races. I think we had a bunch of athletes get qualified here in Canada for draft legal before racing Clermont and Sarasota. It was required in Quebec for a while not sure about it now.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? What is a drafting qualification and what kind of coach is needed? I’ve never heard of this before.
Normally during Feb. down is Mission Bay in CA at a race called tritonman they have a draft legal race. It doesn’t look like they got the permits for it this year but having done it twice in the past all I can say is you have to swim FASTTT and run even faster to well in that format.
As noted above, there are very few DL races around. USAT has a DL Duathlon and Triathlon Nationals Championship race. The DL Du is in Greenville in April. The DL Triathlon has not yet been announced (it’s NOT in Cleveland with the other Nationals races). Both are sprint distance races. These can feed into the ITU World Championship races.
I wish there were more options. I’ve raised the idea with some of the RDs in the Boston area with no luck.
It appears you need to race one of the sanctioned events (not necessarily draft legal, their web page list the ones they want) do well enough… The results required are on USAT web page, to apply for an elite license. Then you would need to fulfil the health and drafting proficiency requirements and then the ITU conti cup races become available to you.
Basically get an Elite License if you want to race ITU is the short answer.
With your reference to Olympic (either the games or the distance for that matter) I am assuming you are talking elite racing. First thing you will need to do is to earn your elite card from results in age group races (there are age group sprint races that are draft legal, as are the ITU AG worlds for Sprint tri and Du). At the elite level, depending on where you race, you may need a draft certification. Check with USAT (in Canada it’s governed by the provincial governing bodys). The mention to a coach, is not that you need a specific type of coach (although i would start with certified one…) but that the draft certification courses that you need to take are usually led by specific coaches who have been certified to administer these programs. So you would just need to locate one of these sessions, and register and participate.
That piece aside… A domestic series of DL races makes a lot of sense… for youth/junior/U23… They could tack on an age group race to some of these and that would be cool (that could maybe have an earlier start for elites…)… But once athletes make the elite ranks, the pathway to the olympics is not domestic racing… It’s international racing, for that you need to look at the Continental Cups (CAMTRI in the americas), World Cups and World Triathlon Series events. You need to earn points to be able to work your way up, and ultimately for selection to major events, not to mention points at the WC/WTS level are key criteria in olympic qualification (both in countries earning spots on the start list, and athletes earning those spots from their country…).
You may need to get the drafting qualifications from a qualified whatever coach to get into draft legal racing. It is required in some races. I think we had a bunch of athletes get qualified here in Canada for draft legal before racing Clermont and Sarasota. It was required in Quebec for a while not sure about it now.
Can you elaborate on this a bit? What is a drafting qualification and what kind of coach is needed? I’ve never heard of this before.
Sounds like rules in the US might be different, but in Ontario age-groupers do not need a drafting card/certification to compete in our draft-legal events (juniors and elites do). To answer your question though, this certification basically states that you have enough bike handling skill in a group to not pose a danger to yourself or others… it’s a list of skills that a qualified (see USAT for what that entails for you guys) coach tests you on. If qualifying for ITU age-group Worlds in a draft-legal format interests you, the sprint distance is currently draft-legal for age-groupers… but not the standard/oly distance.
The Canadian Championships for sprint distance are unfortunately being run as non-drafting this year (don’t get me started…). Triathlon Canada doesn’t require that qualification slots come from a drafting event (don’t get me started on that either). But we have 2 draft-legal events that I know of in Ontario in 2018 – the Toronto Triathlon Festival, and the Provincial Draft-Legal Championship. That’s probably a big trip for you, even from Boston. But as I said, you don’t require any kind of certification. For your US sprint-distance nationals or other US DL races, you’d have to check.
Draft-legal format is really exciting… I’m glad to see someone else keen to participate. We’re having some trouble getting momentum for it up here, but I’m hopeful that if folks give it a try they’ll be hooked like I am.
In the US, all draft-legal races are geared towards the Olympics and USAT has some specific pathways. At the end of the day, I think Olympic triathletes will come from the ITU/WTS participants. To get there, one has to a) have elite card, and b) moving up the rank through continental cups (CAMTRI) and other ITU races. In addition to the 6 youth/junior draft-legal races USTA runs (5 qualifying and 1 national championship) as a way to move the younger triathletes up the ladder, USAT also has a collegiate recruiting program that’s been quite successful in turning swimmer/runner into draft-legal triathletes - I believe Gwen Jergenson came out of that program. But unfortunately I don’t see much options for adults wanting to try draft-legal.
