has simon lessing already announced where he will qualify for IM Hawaii ?
he could do worse than comming to Lubbock @ Buffalo Springs Lake 1/2 IM on June 20th.
We’d love to have him visit our state.
I don’t mean to sound stupid, but my assumption would be that an athlete of his caliber may get an exemption to the normal qualifying standards. Anybody hear anything like that?
is he on a reality tv show?
I guess the WTC is at liberty to extend an invitation to anyone they choose, but in all fairness, Simon should have to qualify. They made Zack have to go qualify at another event when he fell on bad luck in Germany with the seat fiasco a couple of years ago. THe only time that I have heard of them allowing a top contender to bypass the qualification was the first year that Luc V.L. won Hawaii. He had just won the ITU long distance worlds and they allowed him a wild card entry based on that. There might be other exceptions, but that is the only one that I am aware of.
As studly and an amazing an athlete as Jurgen is, he won’t sell incremental points on the Nielson numbers for the NBC coverage, but the bachelor dude likely will, as did the Baywatch babe. Speaking of the uberbiker Zack, I was surprised browsing through the 1994 results to see that Devlin using a terribly slack Merlin outsplit Zack and then had one of the fastest run splits.
As for wildcards and qualifying, they even made Dave Scott qualify for his 1994 comeback race. Since then, I heard that they waived that requirement for former winners and they all get an automatic invite each year. Glad that they invited Glah back. Hawaii without Glah would be like triathlon without the run 
Francois, back in 94, they did make Dave qualify. He blew up at Gulf Coast in his first try at qualifying and then qualified later in the year. Inside tri (or was it still Triathlon Today…can’t remember) had a good article on that Gulf Coast race. Yes, I did see Olaf’s results. Looks like he was giving Zack a good run for it !
Unless they changed it agin this year, I don’t think they offer Pro slots at any of the Half IMs anymore.
Haim