Then I don’t fully understand the motives for this. Shutting down ObsTri doesn’t help Ironman and it doesn’t help the sport. I know lots of folks who used ObsTri for various reasons. Sure it was great looking at the competition for races. But other features that listed out the races easily by date and location and showed course information (weather, elevation, location) were very helpful as well. ObsTri was a website that focused exclusively on the IM branded races and many of us were “obsessed” with this neat website. Something like this was actually helpful for the brand encouraging more interest in the brand and actual race courses. It unfortunate. Shutting down ObsTri helps no one.
The motives are pretty clear IMO. Ironman publishes the results (poorly) on their site. Someone then published those results on their own site. If ObsTri made any money at all then that is money Ironman feels entitled to (even though it is public data once published).
It’s like that episode of The Office when Ryan made a website (Dunder Mifflin Infinity) to sell paper, but it also had a chat room and social media stuff. It’s silly, but the real idea was that they wanted to keep people on the Dunder Mifflin site to see the logo, ingrain the brand, maybe even sell some paper. Exact same thing with Ironman. Keep people on the site, ingrain the brand. I’d imagine their marketing team classifies anyone getting info on their races from a site other than their own as a loss. Growing the sport be damned, they’ve got shareholders who need quarterly growth.