Between the decent amount of ITU-style racing on TV and hours upon hours of Tour coverage, I’ve been thinking about the way the ITU pros race.
Why don’t triathletes have teams like cyclists? I know Victor Plata has/had a team together, but that doesn’t seem to be the norm. From what it looks like on TV, it seems like it would be better to drop wearing country names on the front of the uniforms and put big sponsorship logos. I would then get a couple of great swim-bike specialists to protect a strong runner. I bet it would make for more compelling racing and greater sponsorship opportunities. The roots of triathlon might be as an individual sport, but when racing is draft-legal and people work together anyway, a strong team could really dominate. There could be all sorts of options for strategy depending on how the race starts and who’s in it.
Any thoughts or explanations on why it is the way it is?
Since the day that the ITU allowed drafting in it’s races back in the 90’s MANY people said that this is what it would come to. That it would be the ruin of the sport. Yet, almost 15 years on, and this has yet to come to pass - it’s still an individual sport. Now, there are some on-the-fly alliances that are developed on the bike, but there is to my knowledge never been a formalized approach to this that has had any impact in ITU World Cup, World Championship or Olympic Games Races. The Kinesys team in the U.S. seemed to be formed along these lines - get some strong swimmer/bikers to get an overall strong guy, but with a BIG run in position to win, but, from what I have seen this team has had mixed success. Are they still around? I have not heard much recently.
The roots of triathlon might be as an individual sport, but when racing is draft-legal and people work together anyway, a strong team could really dominate.<<
Well, how well people work together (or don’t) is the problem. If people worked as a true team, certain countries most likely would have won a medal or two in the past Olympics.
I believe the World Cup events (the important ones) are by invitation based on your ranking. Your support guys trashing themselves and fading on the run will eventually drop in the rankings. Then they won’t be high enough placed to get invited to the races.
So maybe there should be a fundamental shift in the way rankings are organized. Give out bids to teams, not individuals.
It seems like if cycling, swimming, and running can all be lucrative and popular in Europe, triathlon should be as well, which could then support teams. I guess the teams would need to get the bulk of their funding through sponsorship in order to pay all of the domestiques and then split any prize winnings.
that’s if you want triathlon to become like cycling. But we don’t want that to happen, it is fine as it is, interesting enough as it is, as an individual sport. Therefore keeping an individual ranking will prevent us from having too many alliances or teams.
There still will be some to a certain degree, but not too significant hopefully. For example, at the 2006 Commonwealth games, the australians had a team tactics in place. There is the start of a mini-scandal in Australia at the moment because the TA Elite manager (Bill Daveron) can discretionary choose what athletes will go to Beijing next year, regardless of performances leading up to 2008. He might therefore prefer to choose athletes that could help Brad Kahlefeldt win (like Simon Thompson) rather than athletes that could have a race counter productive to Brad’s racing tactics (Craig Walton or Courtney Atkinson).
Another example : Olivier Marceau probably helped his countryman Sven Riederer to a bronze medal (and the Kiwis to Gold and Silver) in Athens, by working his ass off in the break-away on the bike (although Riederer also did his fair share of the work).