Anyone have any photos of the swim in 2002?
I was there and some of my friends took a lot of pictures while I was struggling in the water. Send me an email if you want me to send you a few.
Filippo
If you google it you can find some race reports etc with photos, here a couple
http://www.adventuresofgreg.com/Log/06-08photos.html
http://www.coloradotriathlete.com/Images/2002/sept02/IMUK-waves.jpg
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Looking at these pictures, it doesn’t look all that bad.
However, I have read many of the 2002 Utah race reports, and I know that it was actually pretty awful. These pictures are deceiving. Murky water, high winds, big waves, and invisible moving buoys all combined to produce an impossible course, an aborted swim, and a drowned athlete.
For what it’s worth, I think the conditions at IMNZ looked much worse than these, based on the few pics I have seen of each race.
For better or for worse, there are some IM entrants who probably could not have handled these conditions. I’ve heard of many people for whom an IM is their first triathlon, and maybe even their first open-water swim. Personally, I don’t think they have any business toeing the line, but since they are there the RD needs to take them into account. IM really doesn’t need another drowning.
Should IM races require a 1/2 IM finish in order to qualify? For me personally, I have worked my way up the ladder, starting with sprints and moving gradually up to the half IM distance. Now that I’ve completed a half, I feel like I now can think about a full. I can’t say how I’d fare in conditions like these, but I think that my previous race experience would have offered some serious benefits.
Maybe WTC needs to reconsider their “take all comers” philosophy. They might not sell out every race the day registration opens, but people are still going to have the dream and I bet WTC will get their money. Making potential participants prove their triathlon proficiency by first completing a half-IM, or even an Oly-distance, might help make the field more safe and bring some ease to race directors facing questionable conditions.
Just my thoughts.
mm
In kind of a twisted way an Ironman Utah finisher’s medal is the rarest of the rare.
Completely agree. I can’t fathom why someone would do an IM as their first and only race. What’s the point? Who cares if you can float, cruise and jog/walk the distance. If you don’t know what you’re doing just stick with the shorter stuff for a while until you’ve got the hang of it.
It is hard to tell from photos but I agree NZ looks worse:
I think your idea of a 1/2 IM finish prior to doing a Full is a great idea and I think they could put a time limit on it too, say in the previous year.
I agree - a racer should have to have done a half-iron in the previous 12-15 months before an IM. I believe that WTC requires all lottery winners to complete a half IM before IM-Hawaii.
There needs to be some sort of prerequisite established. Even a long history of racing triathlons would be fine. What bothers me is the people that attempt an IM with no other race experience, or never have done a half. Heck, even the people with experience have a hard time with an IM.
glad you found those…I was looking the other day during the IMNZ hubbub…its humbling to look at photos that don’t look so bad, but then thinking that someone died there.
I agree and personally adhere to Monty’s “Eddy would go” attitude…and I absolutely mourn the loss of that free-spirit approach to the sport…
but I think the maturity of the sport depends on mature decisions such as the one made, painfully, by the IMNZ RD. It sounds like it could have been made in a better, more timely manner…but not at the expense of the safety of athletes…
Hey Guys, I was at Utah, and it would not have been bad, if the bouys were anchored and visible. Wave action in a lake is very different from the open ocean. At Utah, the waves were sort of rollers, warming up, no one was complaining about the conditions. There was no talk, as I recall, about cancelling the swim prior to the race. It was the disorientation from lack of markers that was the worst of it. (But I am a good swimmer, 49 best im time, usually come out in 54-55)
As I recall, the death at Utah was a result of a Heart Attack, not drowning.
I find myself closer to Monty on this issue, but that is because I know how to swim.
mike.
anyone have pictures of Escape from Alcatraz 2003?
You know, you have a point about it not looking bad from the shore in the photos. I remeber when I used to see photos of a guy jumping out of a helicopter into the water and I thought that was so cool.
Then I did it.
The rotorwash is whipping up the water, you can’t really breath, you can’t see at all and you are being pulled under by your equipment even though you have on fins and are kicking to (literally) save your life.
Rough open water swims are the same. It may not look too menacing from the shore but when you are at water level it is really bad. And, the effects of fatigue make the same conditions “get worse” so to speak as the swim went on.
Another thing about Taupo: The water is cooooolllllllldddddd. I did the race in 2004 and it was perfectly calm but pretty darn cold. I can clearly remember thinking in the final 10 minutes of the swim, “OK, I need to be out of the water soon here or I am going to be in trouble from the cold.”
Believe it or not, I found long online video clips from the 2002 Utah race:
http://leegruenfeld.web1000.com/utah.htm
Available in MPEG and WMV formats; WMV seemed to work much better. Be sure to listen to the audio – you can hear the wind whipping, and there is good insight provided by a spectator.
It is like watching a rescue effort following a shipwreck. People getting pulled out by boats and jetskis, people washing up on the beach. Very eerie images.
I don’t know how the person died, but if folks were having that much trouble in waters that looked relatively calm, then I don’t see how they could have swam in NZ. The fact that the buoys were blown off course didn’t help the Utah situation, but nonetheless…it looked like a mess.
If you read the online race reports, you’ll notice that many competitors could not hear the prerace announcements in the water because of the wind. Somebody thought they heard the cannon fire, and somebody else yelled “Go!”, so they everybody started swimming at 6:53am, about seven minutes early according to one account. That probably didn’t help matters any from a safety perspective.
However, it seems like people eventually got the message to go back to shore one way or the other. Either they heard it from volunteers on boats, or they saw all their wetsuit-clad competitors getting into boats, or they followed the helicopter, or they “swam towards the sun” as one person reported hearing yelled at them. The fact that the return to shore was directly into the sun, combined with the wind and waves, meant that people ended up all over the shoreline, well away from the entry/exit. Even if the waters had been calm, this might have been a problem for some swimmers.
In any case, I hope that the people planning future races have taken the time to study races like IM 2002 Utah and 2006 NZ. I think there is a lot that can be learned from observing the events of those days. Rhis knowledge could be used to help future events run more smoothly and safely.
mm
The wind wasn’t so bad early in the morning. It got really bad once we were already in the lake threading water, waiting for the start. About 10 minutes before 7.00 it started to get really nasty, there were people who started to panick right away and I remember my buddy Bernie (an Air Force lt) who decided immediately to go helping those folks. Around 6.55 we just saw a bunch of people taking off and right after that I think I heard the cannon. I tried to follow a bunch of people in front of me but the swells were really nasty. Like Tom said, once you’re at water level everything changes.
I was in the water for more than 1h trying to figure where the buoys were. At a certain point there were people converging from all different directions, all of us clueless. Then I was approached by a girl on a canoe or something who told me that the swim had been cancelled and to swim toward a rescue boat. I eventually reached the shore (to which I was pointed by the people on the rescue boat, otherwise I might have ended up miles downstream) about a mile south of the start. The point is that well 1h into the “race” only those who stayed near the shore or those who didn’t event start knew that the race had been cancelled. The vast majority was clueless and kept looking for something that resembled a buoy or some kind of mark. The volunteers did an amazing job trying to round us up and in my opinion it was a miracle that only one guy died (because of a heart attack) and none was significantly injured.
As far as visibily is concerned. well, in the days preceding the race the lake had been flat and it was very very easy to navigate. You could easily pick any landmark and I don’t think it would’ve been a problem to reach the finish line (but that’s my opinion).In the end it was a bummer for most of us (heck I came from Italy to do my first IM!) but it was the only logical choice that the rd had. In fact I think nobody complained about the
Filippo