Can’t help myself here, your article demands discussion!
One of the great compromises in triathlon was the concession to spectators of draft legal racing. Don’t make a bad situation worse OR, if this is to be a team event then make it a team event. Anything short of that is undermining the nature of the sport and to provide incentives for that is truly pathetic.
Hats off to Sheila (and Loretta for that matter) but as it turned out no one was going to stop the freight train that ran through the field!!!
I can forsee the day coming when there will actually be a US Postal style team of TT’ers whose job will be pulling a good runner thru the bike split to put him/her to the front to start the run. The so called “purists” may not like it but it will make tri more interesting to watch on TV and in order to grow triathlon has to be commercially viable to a television audence.
While what you say may be true, it still seems a pretty sad testament to our world that the measure of whether something is inherently worthwhile is whether or not it is “interesting to watch on TV and… commercially viable to a television audience.”
Who said anything about trying to “measure it being worth while”. It’s a draft legal race (to make it tv friendly) you may want to incorporate some draft strategies.
It’s funny, everyone predicted this a decade ago when drafting was first allowed. However, 10 years, on and it has not happened. ITU racing is still very individualistic. Strategic, pre-planned team tactics, are rare. Their are, no doubt, alliances reached out on the course, but it tends to be passive and happenstance and dictated by how the race unfolds.
The Kinesys team was the first team, to my knowledge to really embrace the format and recruit people for specific roles who are working to support key individuals. Their goal was to get someone on the US Olympic team and they did that.
Team Kinyesis (sp?)!!! They used the team concept to get Plata to Athens, it worked, others need to take note, if other ITU racers dont like it, they should do non drafting races. Strongest runners sits back while the fastest cyclists on the team pulls them to T2. The trick is getting them all out of the water at the same time. Didnt spain do this at the world championships a couple of years ago?