My Week in Tri: 10 July

Results, 7 Bullets, Tri vs Tennis Pro Earnings

Author

Aero MaccaFrodownlee
July 10, 2023

My Week in Triathlon

My triathlon thoughts and learnings over the last week. Hit reply if you have feedback… 

Ironman Switzerland: Full Results here

An interesting race where 30% of the starters didn’t finish. van Berkel was 2min behind after the swim with Arnold a further 2min behind. By halfway on the bike they were riding together but almost 6min down on Zepuntke who was smashing the bike. Zepuntke finished the bike with an almost 10min lead to a group of 8 athletes including all members of the podium. The chasers ran together, steadily whittling down the lead, until 21km to go. Arnold was running in 2nd place 2min behind but with more than a minutes lead on van Berkel. He took the lead for about 5km until van Berkel made his move to finish strong over the last 10km.

Men

🥇 Jan van Berkel (08:05:01)

🥈 Leonard Arnold (08:07:13)

🥉 Andrea Salvisberg (08:10:24)

Other Bullets:

  • IM Switzerland: 2nd place Leonard Arnold was on Ironman debut and rode on his girlfriends bike - shout out to The Daily Tri for that info. Jan van Berkel has been on the podium 8 out of 9 times and won it 5 times...another Dan Plews success story. Remember Sam Long fired Dan as his coach after a few months.

  • New Era for Ironman: The Ironman CEO of 12 years, Andrew Messick, announced his retirement last week. Will this pave the way for more PTO collaboration? Search for his interview with Jack Kelly in your usual podcast player or click here to listen. P.S. the “How They Train” podcast has been rebranded to “The Triathlon Hour”.

  • Nice World Champs recce: GTN did an entertaining course preview of the Ironman Nice race course. It couldn’t be more different to Kona. I was bitter they moved it from Kona but now I cannot wait. Watch the video here.

  • TDF Update: There have been 3 major punches between Vingegaard and Pogacar that have landed over the first week. Vingegaard landed the first and biggest one putting him in yellow, but Pogacar has landed the last two leaving him just 17s behind and feeling like the favourite.

  • Frodeno behind the scenes: I know it’s a weird suggestion, but Kyle Smith is Jan Frodeno’s training partner…so have a look at Kyle’s Youtube video to see some rare raw footage of Frodo training. Video here.

  • Frodeno Tunes: Sticking with Frodo, I did some Spotify stalking for my upcoming website overhaul and found this playlist he created that had my head bopping and feeling “connected” with him. Playlist here.

  • Personal lows: I usually get dressed in the dark - quietly while my spouse and dog sleep away. A few weeks ago I thought I hit a low when I put my cycling shorts on back to front…the feeling of that chamois in the wrong places 🫢 This morning, however, I hit a new low…I got my cycling kit out the cupboard, tip-toed out the room and closed the door behind me. “Um, these pants feel very tight. How much cake did I eat this weekend?!” Only after my cycle did I realize I had put my wife’s cycling shorts on 🤦 

Data

My Analysis is a little light but I’m keen to do a deeper dive soon. I looked at the prize earnings of tennis players ranked 1st, 10th and 50th. I then tried to calculate the prize money for the equivalent triathletes. I’d like to re-do this at the end of the year, but, can we see a future for Triathlon where the earnings start looking similar? Blummenfelt won the most prize money in 2022 but this was only $480,000…a far cry from Carlos Alcaraz winning $10m. Why am I comparing Triathlon to Tennis? Chris Kermode was the President and Executive Chairman for the ATP before joining the PTO as the Executive Chairman in 2022.

Yours in low CdA,

Aero MaccaFrodownlee

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