Originally published at: Race Rewind: The Tactics That Led Casper Stornes to an IRONMAN World Title - Slowtwitch News
Casper Stornes is the male 2025 IRONMAN World Champion, prevailing out of a pack of five men that left T2 all together to start the marathon on Sunday. Marten Van Riel, Sam Laidlow, Gustav Iden, Kristian Blummenfelt, and Stornes ran together through the opening miles of the run, with Nick Thompson less than a minute behind. It was arguably one of the greatest run battles weāve ever seen at an IRONMAN World Championship.
One-by-one, athletes started to fall away. The first to fall off the hot pace was Van Riel, who had battled injury during the summer months that significantly impacted his run training. Laidlow was next to start paying the toll, with the gap opening up over the second lap. And it looked like Stornes would be next; Iden surged, with Blummenfelt coming forward with him, and Stornes suddenly was 35 seconds behind the lead with 15.5 miles to run.
After the race, Stornes told us this was by design. āI needed to be smart if I wanted to beat them,ā he said. āGustav put on quite a heavy pace and I was like, āIs he going for a 2:25 [marathon]?ā āI felt actually quite good. But itās easy to feel good at the start of a marathon also, so I didnāt take anything for granted that I would feel like that the whole way.ā
Surging forward, Stornes caught Blummenfelt and Iden to begin the third run lap, and started putting time into them. And he wouldnāt be caught. The 2:29:25 marathon brought Stornes the world title, and with Iden and Blummenfelt sweeping the podium for Norway, it also made it the first time that all three podium finishers had an IRONMAN world title to their name.
Stornesā masterclass in run pacing was the critical component to his victory on Sunday. Not many athletes would have the discipline to allow Iden and Blummenfelt to run up the road with that little time left on course. Yet Stornes trusted the plan, and executed it to perfection. But it was just one piece of the overall puzzle that fell into place. There were at least two other critical components to his victory.
Swimming in the Front Pack
By most accounts, Stornes is not one of the elite swimmers in long-distance triathlon. To be clear, heās not someone who is giving up a large deficit in the water. But Stornes is typically in that second-tier swim level; heās around Blummenfelt, which means heās going to be giving up somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds on the leaders.
In Nice, though, Stornes held onto the front pack of the swim. He was the back of the leading swim pack, led by Andrea Salvisberg (pictured above) and which featured athletes like Jamie Riddle, Van Riel, the typically dangerous Antonio Benito LĆ³pez, and Jonas Schomburg. He was 40 seconds clear of some typically front swim-bikers like Blummenfelt, Magnus Ditlev, and Matthew Marquardt. And he was two minutes up on Iden.
It meant that, with firepower on the bike behind him, instead of in front of him, Stornes could tactically ensure he waited for the right moment in the ride to start executing. That came roughly a quarter of the way into the bike.
Laidlowās Charge to the Front of the Chase
Sam Laidlow had, by his standard, a terrible swim. He, like Iden, was in the third group of swimmers, two minutes down to the leaders. Itās a far cry from how he typically executes a race; like Lucy Charles-Barclay, heās an athlete that gets to the front early and tries to stay there all day. Sometimes it works brilliantly, like it did in Kona 2022 and when he became IRONMAN World Champion here in 2023. And sometimes, it ends disastrously, as he came unglued on the run last year in Kona.
As Laidlow told us after the race, he had cramps in both hip flexors that he found debilitating, nearly pulling the plug on the event before it had really gotten started. āI had to stop and stretch it out,ā he said. āIt was a long swim. I couldnāt wait to get out of the water, to be honest.ā (Editorās Note: you know you have incredible swim talent when you have to stop to stretch and you still clock a 47 minute swim.)
Laidlow originally had made plans with Van Riel and Riddle to swim hard, and then make an elite level bike group up front. Tactics like this arenāt uncommon ā Chris McCormack famously goaded some of the then-elite bikers to try and ride away from Craig Alexander at the 2010 IRONMAN World Championship, and then won the race because of it. Of course, Laidlow missed that group, whereas Van Riel and Riddle forged onward with Schomburg to stay away.
It meant when Laidlow caught up, there was an opportunity to hang with him. Stornes, Blummenfelt, and Iden took advantage of it, forming an elite chase group. Also along for the ride was Ditlev and Thompson. They dropped Rudy Von Berg in the process, meaning the Von Berg would not be able to use his familiarity with the course and the descent as an advantage in the same way he did in 2023.
That group mostly stayed together until the halfway mark, when Laidlow and Blummenfelt put in a concerted effort to close down the gap to the leaders. Thompson, Iden, and Stornes stayed back, but kept the gap to under two minutes. It took forever for Laidlow and Blummenfelt to bridge to the front, only finally making contact with Van Riel after thirty miles of chasing. By the time the race was back in Nice, proper, the six leading men were spread across 35 seconds ā setting up for the run battle to come.
