Reminds me of the time in college when one of my housemates taped a bunch of Playgirl photos in one of my textbooks.
Professor: Open your textbook to page 87.
Me: Opened textbook to page 87 and saw a full page picture of naked dude posing with his 10” boner. Immediately closed textbook and hoped people sitting next to me didn’t see that. Then I heard the girl sitting next to me chuckling. I then spent the entire class with textbook closed and unable to follow along and hoped professor didn’t notice.
When I got back to the house I had to go page by page through the entire book (and all my other textbooks and notebooks) to remove the twenty other pictures randomly placed in there.
Fast forward a couple of months… the house next to us was the ΣΑΕ “unofficial” frat house. We were over there for a party and I was talking to one of the guys that lives there. His room and my room face each other on the second floor of our respective houses. He said, “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you something. What’s with that poster hanging in your window?” I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about. He said go up to his room and look out his window. Yep, the Playgirl centerfold was taped to my window shade and had been there for months.
If you do a very basic probability analysis, you can easily conclude that it is extremely unlikely that 4-5 (can’t recall) of the top 35-39 AG will have their tires flat and their saddles loose. Occam’s razor: think of all the assumptions around a hypothesis that would make all of the above be a coincidence.
Hold my beer. In summer school in high school, I played (second chair, first violin) in the pit orchestra for the musical being performed. On the last night, we (well, not me) taped a centerfold to a page in one of the crazier pieces…in the conductor’s score. After the initial shock, he thought it was funny.
On the boat racing tangent, I was listening to some discussion during a long drive about how in the past, teams would recruit these strong burly football/rugby type guys to power the winches and stuff b/c the faster you can crank those, then the faster the sails and stuff get set. But these days as things are becoming electronic you don’t need that muscle anymore, and a side effict is that racing crews have opened up to female sailors … they can easily press a button rather than crank a winch.
Look up some of the videos of the Ineos-sponsored sailing and cycling teams working together over the past year. It still happens in competitive sailing.
Anyone ever come across cases of no bike shoes in T1. Local guy. First Ironman. Very competitive. First overall out of the water. Had to do the first half of the bike in running shoes. Came second in AG so still got his KQ and otherwise happy with his race but just in case this is a thing.
Nope, but had all my nutrition taken out of my bento box about 20 minutes before race start (cancelled swim) at Chat last year. 99% sure I know who did it, but no real way to prove it. Frustrating.
Are you talking about Maryland? I saw the racer coming out of T1 with running shoes on bike and officials were talking about possible tampering. I spoke with a race official out of T1 and later during the run. The official explained that the racer had his shoes on the bike in transition which was not allowed. Officials took shoes off of the bike and placed them by his bike bag. Racer didn’t see shoes as he thought they were on bike. When officials figured this all out, they took his bike shoes out to the school at special needs so he could use them for second half. In the end, every racer needs to read the athlete guide and know the rules. At least this is what I heard from the race official. If this is correct then tampering was not the issue - following rules by racer was the issue
Yes it was Maryland. Just seen it on his socials this morning so I was curious. Was going to ask him as I see him around. He didn’t indicate anything untoward on his post. Thanks for clarifying.
Not an IM race but at a local sprint or oly (can’t remember) I once came back into T2 to find all my stuff gone. My swim gear wasn’t in my transition spot and, more importantly at that point, my run stuff wasn’t there. I think I was in the first wave after the elite wave and I probably had a top five bike split in my AG. There were only a couple of dozen bikes in transition at this point so transition is like 98% empty. So I stood there with a bewildered WTF look on my face. A race volunteer came over and asked me what’s wrong. I told her all my stuff is gone. She asks what color shoes, etc. and we both go on a hunt. She finds my stuff two racks away. Why? We have no fucking idea. I grabbed my shoes, hat, and sunglasses and asked her to please move my stuff back. If i remember correctly my number and the number my stuff was moved to were transposed (like I was 437 and my stuff was moved to 347). I think some volunteer or race official must have gone through transition to move people’s stuff incorrectly placed but my stuff was correctly placed.
My dad had this exact thing happen to him in a local race where it was ‘anything goes’ in terms of finding a spot to rack your stuff. He got to T2 and couldn’t find anything. Just his shoes were there and nothing else was around. So he puts on the shoes and decides he’s going to run anyway. Shoes were a bit small, but maybe his feet swelled or something.
Anyway, he gets back in and finds that he’s been DQ’d.
Turns out that when he got back it wasn’t really his spot, and that the shoes weren’t really his - just the same make, model and colourway, but a different size one rack over. In the fog of T2, he had stolen someone else’s shoes. The poor other guy DNF’d.
10 years later, he’s still the cautionary tale at the orientation meeting.
There was another time I legit went to the wrong rack. I went to where I thought my transition spot was to find my run stuff not there. Then I looked up and I was one rack row off. My stuff was about 12 feet in front of me in the next row.
