Most of the snark I saw on this site was related to the handling of the race cancellations during the pandemic. I thought Messick handled it really well by giving people the chance to defer to multiple races. It was a tough time with no good options and he made a pretty generous offer. Some race directors didn’t offer deferrals or refunds at all.
Glad to see that he’s still active in the sport.
Exactly this. The guy could walk away and go enjoy life on a yacht or resort, etc. and he’s going to grind out the weekend in Kona. I don’t care what anyone says, that’s one of our people.
It might be one of our people who doesn’t train very much and just slogs his way through the race. But still, good on him. Count me as one who thinks the world would be a better place if all CEOs and retired folks did long endurance races in their free time instead of all the other pathological things wealthy people could be doing.
I feel like a lot of folks complaints with Ironman and Messick was their complaints aren’t necessarily being heard. Or their perception is they aren’t be heard. If you listen to the PTO podcast with the new CEO, it sounds like they have talked about or are talking about a lot of things we often criticize. I’m sure Scott didn’t start this on his own and continued it from Messick. That said, I think IM and Messick didn’t do a good job of communicating or addressing things upfront or publicly giving their stance on various items (drafting, drug testing, deferrals, etc). They seem pretty secretive and won’t announce anything until they are ready for prime time, which I understand. But I think a few simple, “we heard you and we are looking into it” or “this is why the drafting zone is 12m and not 20m” would go a long way. People want to understand the why. If IM had a bi-annual or annual townhall to address things like this publicly, it would go a long way
i think what most people didn’t consider is the economic model around this company. by my armchair reckoning the chinese pay 4x what the private equity company had into it so the chinese have this $800 million thing they purchased and they sweat the company they just bought for a return. the chinese thought (apparently) that all chinese consumers were going to go out to the movies on friday night and race an IM on sunday. so they became the world’s largest owner of movies screens, and IM. then china launches and exports the world’s worst pandemic in a century and you can’t anymore go to movies or triathlons. but even before that chinese consumers weren’t lining up to race IMs anyway. andrew didn’t engineer any of that. he kept the doors open.
Oh the irony. When we were trying to get equal numbers of female pros to male pros, we were asking for FIFTEEN more spots to make the numbers equal. Messick actually said that there was “no more room on the pier” for those 15 professional women.
But we all know that wasn’t true as they’ve continually added and added numbers of racers to Kona. And the fact that he managed to find “room” for himself to line up… My seething hatred for that man cannot be understated (and no, his recent statements do not cancel out his shitty ones)
Seething hatred because he doesn’t share your priorities, and shares the human tendency to initially reject new ideas out of hand before the seeds have a chance to germinate.
Sometimes it takes years for people to come around. Maybe even some of us will come around to the notion of patience and forgiveness one day 
CEOs have to be the face and voice of the organisation and have to generally always do things which are in the best interests of the organisation. It is rare to have a CEO who will be universally liked, but “seething hatred” for someone who is simply doing their job (rather than what they are like as a person, as a human, what they are like outside of their CEO role), and whose job may be beholden to the masters that he has to report to, is a pretty sad state of affairs. It seems like such a waste of headspace to “hate” someone for the business decisions they have to make, assuming that this also represents who they are outside of their work etc.
Andrew managed to keep a live events business company on the global map during the pandemic. It was in the realm of possibility that the entire thing cratered,
The snark on this site is mainly from people who have never organized events (and I don’t expect people to organize events, we DO events).
I think once you have developed events and put them on, you view these things from a different participant lense (just like those of us complaining about bikes who have never built them and brought them to market). Inherently the job of a the company leader is to manage diverse stakeholders and it is impossible to keep all customers happy.
Many cusotmers deserve to be fired and never be a customer again which likely is the case of a minority of snark on this website that his its unfair share of squeeky wheel amplified noise on social media. I am way over in a relatively far flung corner of the triathlon world (actually way closer to my home than Hawaii) for a 70.3 in Marocco.
Andrew really grew the 70.3 series globally. It has massive pull in all corners of the world. Talking to the average athletes many of whom travelled to race and check out a new venue, they love what Ironman is doing spreading the sport globally. Maybe that was Graham Fraser’s idea that was truly productized and exported from Penticton to venues across the US, but under Andrew’s regime we truly saw the global rollout.
Does he deserve a Kona slot…probably the same way that the CEO of Porsche could get a free lease on a Porsche Taychan rocket machine if he just walks down the production line…except Andrew never took that when he was CEO because he was too darn busy managing the production line so we could all get product.
Good luck to him on race day. As others daid being in the 60+ age group there are better things in life than to crank out an Ironman and very early in his tenure, many probably don’t realize that he came over to Mont Tremblant and did IM Tremblant before they took the 70.3 Worlds outside the USA. He wanted to product test the venue before he exposed us a bunch of French guys in my home province hostnig the world in a language 99% of this website won’t understand before he took it in 2015 to Austria. But you got a like a CEO who eats his own cooking.
very disrecptfull to call it the chinease[quote=“Slowman, post:24, topic:1282112, full:true”]
i think what most people didn’t consider is the economic model around this company. by my armchair reckoning the chinese pay 4x what the private equity company had into it so the chinese have this $800 million thing they purchased and they sweat the company they just bought for a return. the chinese thought (apparently) that all chinese consumers were going to go out to the movies on friday night and race an IM on sunday. so they became the world’s largest owner of movies screens, and IM. then china launches and exports the world’s worst pandemic in a century and you can’t anymore go to movies or triathlons. but even before that chinese consumers weren’t lining up to race IMs anyway. andrew didn’t engineer any of that. he kept the doors open.
[/quote]
you sound like a trump supporter now with your rhetoric … you forgot to say the Chinese eat our dogs …
but i guess factual you are correct about ironman.
Wait, is this a Trump thread now? Awesome!! I’m a Trump supporter. Let’s Go!!!
dalian wanda, the wildly overpaying former owner of IRONMAN, domiciled in a country west of the pacific ocean, and east of a bunch of countries that end in -stan. that better?
Sounds like there are some sour grapes from folks that aren’t there… and Messick is.
CEO/leadership can be a thankless job where you’re not going to please everyone all the time. I’d say he’s earned his dues and wish him well out there.
And in his current role, it sounds like he knows his place in line - literally.
Ha! This has been the case forever.
What’s Mongolia gonna do with Ironman? They shoulda bought UTMB instead.