there have been many discussions here about the pro’s performances in Kona in recent years. Maybe no one will care, but I was thinking about a lot of this heading into this years race and ended up putting my thoughts down to paper (or bits). I’ve ended up changing my position from working through all this. I’d love to hear any comments.
Is winning enough?
For the past several years, I have derided the men’s winning times at Ironman Hawaii as being short of the athlete’s best efforts. My qualifications for doing so are that I have been to Hawaii several times on vacation (though never to the Big Island), and that I have done a triathlon before (though never an Ironman). With my credentials firmly in hand, I have suggested that, the men primarily, are sitting in on the bike and then running to victory on relatively fresh legs. I contrast this with my own deep study of the early years of triathlon, mostly done when I was in High School watching Wide World of Sports coverage of Dave Scott and Mark Allen. My argument has been that the early greats were more interested in testing their personal limits and discovering what Triathlon really was, and that the current champions are far less concerned with this, than with winning the race and cashing in the paycheck.
As an age-group triathlete, I’m in no danger of winning a race outright, so my focus is always on self-improvement. “To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.” (Steve Prefontaine) If that’s true for me with my average gifting than how much more is being sacrificed by those who are truly gifted? As a culture, giving your best is what we expect and demand from our hero’s. Like it or not, in the sport of triathlon, winning the Ironman Hawaii is supposed to make you a hero. However, as a group, triathletes have not been treating Tim DeBoom as a hero. Certainly there was some patriotic hero-ness to his post 9/11 win, but all in all, the majority of the tri-community has seemingly yawned at Tim’s wins. This has only affirmed my belief that winning isn’t enough. Like other sports we should be seeing continual improvement and broken records.
As the 2003 race approached I began questioning this and wondering what would be good enough for me, come race day. As it turns out, my expectations weren’t very reaistic.
Everybody can’t be a legend
The NBC hype machine certainly doesn’t help. The overdramatic presentation of most anything coming from NBC Sports only fuels our expectations of modern athletes. Everybody is the next-Somebody. How many next-Michael Jordan’s has the media anointed in the NBA to date? The reality is that it may be quite some time before someone else in the NBA exhibits the kind of all around skill that MJ did. Cycling is no different. Even if Lance successfully wins his 6th title, Eddy Merckx will still continue to be regarded as the finest cyclist ever. Merckx is a legend. Only the history books should determine if someone else can match or beat him. Lance, or anyone else, should not feel obligated to obtain legend status, or compete with a ghost. All we should request, in order to gain our adoration, and more importantly our time and money (spent watching the sport, and on the sponsors wares) is to see the best that the pro’s have to give. We saw that from both Lance and Jan on Alpe d’Huez in 2001, and we saw a different side of that in 2003 when Lance may not have shown his physical best ever, but he did show us his mental best.
The quick succession from Bernhard Hinault to Miguel Indurain to Lance Armstrong, may be falsely fueling our belief that we should be pouring out the legends similarly in triathlon. We must fight false expectations set by the sports media in an attempt to define everything at an epic level. As athletes and competitors we should be content that some find our avocation worthy of full-time devotion, and that for the gifted, there are sponsors willing to foot the bill to see them deliver their best. When they deliver we should celebrate their accomplishments without measuring them against the legends of the past.
The pool is only so deep
Ignoring the race in Kona, any given Ironman generally has 3 or less actual title contenders. Major races in the sports that make up triathlon, swimming, biking and running, would typically have much deeper fields than that. The lack of monetary payout to the winners makes triathlon a fringe event. Even if we were to somehow significantly increase the pay out, the time commitment involved to win in long course triathlon would still leave many other sports a more attractive target for the monetarily motivated endurance athlete. This gives us a shallow pool to pull from in our search for future legends. It also means we are less likely to see steady continual improvements and records as we see in other sports.
Kona vs. other premiere races
Trying to pick a suitable race from another sport to compare to Ironman Hawaii is not very easy. Other endurance sports do not have a self-proclaimed world championship. Cycling has the Tour de France, but its focus on strategy and collection of 20 individual stage races tied together makes a tough comparison. Running has the Chicago and London marathons, but the truth is, each of these has become a defacto meeting of the worlds best based on the potential for setting a world record (flat course, with favorable weather). Swimming has the Olympics, but the distances involved don’t lend them to be easily compared to the Ironman.
Kona stands on it’s own. Similar to the spirit of the first Ironman on Oahu, it is more about what we are able to endure, than trying to setup a course suitable for comparing our progress from year to year. In this sense, Kona is more similar to an adventure race. No one would attempt to compare the times from 2 consecutive Eco-Challenges in order to determine who was the better team. Perhaps we would be better off approaching the variable weather at Kona in a similar fashion.
Drafting
As a casual observer who has read accounts of past races, it would appear that the enforcement of the drafting rules has been sporadic through the years. Reports from the 1995 races suggest that Mark Allen actually thanked riders he drafted on at the awards banquet for helping him win. Rather than look down on Mark for an act we might currently deem as unfair, we should simply accept that it was what it was. If this is in fact the way things were a few years ago, it makes comparison from year to year a bit more difficult, if not impossible.
For the good of the sport as we know it, I the WTC, as well as USAT and the other sanctioning boards, must continue to improve the no-drafting enforcement. The current three minute stand down doesn’t seem like much of a penalty. A ten minute stand down for the first infraction would have a greater deterrent effect, and lead to less riders pushing the limits of the drafting rules.
The juice
We would be foolish to assume that triathlon is somehow exempt from doping. As a sport we seem far less interested in pursuing dopers than cycling has in the past few years. Given the number of pro’s who train with European pro cyclists, and the prevalence of performance enhancing drugs in the pro peloton, we should only assume that a statistically relevant number of pro triathletes are on the juice. The likelihood of past Kona winners being juiced up increases the difficulty in comparing current times with past times.
Winning by doping has no honor, but the blame should not be on the doping athletes (whoever they may be) alone. The referee’s, race directors and sanctioning boards who ignore strict enforcement are also to blame. They need to clean up our sport before we suffer the same fate professional cycling has. Sure, it won’t be cheap to seriously increase the amount of testing we do, but it will be even more expensive to ignore it until it blows up in our face. The tests should be as comprehensive as possible, and as the THG scandal from the 2003 Track & Field World Championship shows, we should consider going back and re-testing old samples as new tests become available. Testing old samples should not be done to punish those from the past who got away with it, but to create an environment where the risk of getting caught both now and in the future is just too great. It would be less damaging to the sport to be open and honest, then to sweep things under the rug.
Prime’s and bonus’
Many of the current arguments about the pro men revolve around them “sitting-in” on the bike. This likely stems from a fear that long course racing could go the same path as ITU style racing as well as our desire for a hero to break from the pack and win the race on his or her own terms.
While we can certainly continue to hope for someone to bring long course racing to a whole new level, that shouldn’t belittle the work being done now at the present level. There are enough people in Kona each year hungry enough for the win, that if they thought they could win by breaking away on the bike, they would do it. Not only does it belittle the winner to suggest that they’re sitting in on the bike, but it belittles the entire field, by saying that they never had the guts to do anything more than simply watch the winner win. With all the ego involved in being a top athlete in any sport, that seems highly unlikely.
More likely the problem is that the payout in Hawaii has gotten to be large enough that there is too much at stake to risk loosing it in the hopes of setting a course record. What if, as is common in running, the payout were doubled (or more) if you set a course record? Would this change the way the pro’s race? Would they lay more on the line? Maybe yes, maybe no. Given the course record, and the winning times since 1997, Lloyds of London would probably give the WTC a pretty cheap insurance policy in order to add a $500,000 bonus for a new course record. It seems likely that we’d see a bit more daring racing with that much money on the line.
In addition, a return of the Swim and Bike prime’s would help, too. Certainly the payoff would be decent for the sponsors. You can hear the NBC announcer saying “Jan Sibberson wins the Speedo fastest swim of the day, for the third year in a row”. Complete with Speedo graphics on the screen and perhaps an additional trophy at the end of the day. Same thing on the bike and the run. Make the payout something decent like $50,000, and you’d get some ringers in on the day to try to walk off with the booty. We’d need to require that they finish the entire event in order to collect the prize money. With a small collection of Olympic swimmers, European domestique’s, and Kenyan marathoners, we’d see the status quo of the race mixed up a bit.
A little something for everybody
Our sport is great. We certainly aren’t in a state of crisis. But the love we have for it makes us want it to be even more successful. To achieve that we need to give a little more as outlined above.
Pro’s
• Give us the best that you’ve got. We’re paying your bills through our race fee’s, and support of your sponsors. Like it or not it’s a show, and we are watching to be impressed and inspired.
Fan’s
• Realize that legendary greatness is something likely only determined from hindsight. In the meantime we should celebrate the winners when they win.
• Keep in mind that Kona was not designed as a WR setting course. It is highly variable and likely not suitable for year to year comparison.
WTC
• Enforce drafting with complete vigor and consider increasing the penalty
• Enforce drug testing with equal vigor and consider retesting past results
• Establish a course record bonus
• Establish prime’s for the best time in each discipline by a finisher