Far more likely is that other athletes in the race saw the shoes, the gossiping jungle drums started beating and whisperings of ‘testing the limits – and beyond’ circulate. I’m not buying that one! If nothing else, the shoe was already on the approved list. Did that represent evidence of a breakdown in communications between the governing body and its athletes – or between athletes on the team? So, in the cold light of day, a ‘representative from the Norwegian Federation’ tried to call out one of their own athletes. …those shoes were listed in their approved shoes list before March 3 under the name ON SHOES CloudTRI 1 per their specifications.Ĭase dismissed, the defendant is free to run! Hopefully faster than they did in Abu Dhabi. Who saw that one coming?! Fallout, scandal and the sport rocked to its core. It’s an inside job! Photo Credit: Wagner Araujo / World Triathlon Mutiny, civil war! World Triathlon received a protest from a representative from the Norwegian Federation regarding the shoes used by athlete #41, Gustav Iden (NOR) A lactate strip is not going save you this time!Īnd then, in the spirit of Agatha Christie, World Triathlon passed judgement, with the shocking news that started with: Time to bring those boys down a peg or two. Still, had the attention-to-detail Norwegians, like Icarus, been caught out flying too close to the sun? Had their drive to push the boundaries of science, training and technology been rumbled with a “look mate, rules are there for a reason – and you’ve clearly broken them with those new kicks of yours… even if you did run like a donkey today.” Still whatever clouds they would be running on moving forward, would have a maximum stack height of 40mm. If you can’t beat them (in Kona), join them? As one door closes, another opens, and Kristian wanted to be running through it with his training partner… and he signed with ON, too. The party was soon over for those particular shoes though, when World Triathlon implemented the regulations of World Athletics for the new year. (Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images for IRONMAN) And assets tend to grow, when you win the IRONMAN World Championship. 2:36:15 of course-record marathon running through the lava fields showed that not only was he running on clouds, but his clouds were an asset, not a liability. Well, turns out the Gustav is smarter than the average bear, and there was calculated method in what some saw as madness. Detractors laughed, ‘he’s taken the money!”. Gustav Iden signed with ON Running just prior to the IRONMAN World Championship in Hawaii. The Rolling Stones sang, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, and from the 1st January 2023, you can’t always wear what you want either. Is this a ‘Gotcha!’ moment? Is the Hype Train on the buffers? 52nd place… and even that might not stick. Result of athlete #41 Iden/NOR is provisional: a shoe protest is pending There’s always a bright side, if you look hard enough.Įven the best can have a bad day though, and when you are the Athlete of the Year from 2022, you can have confidence to put it behind you, and move on to bigger and better things and disappear quietly into the sand dunes. Iden then now leads the WTCS Series, if you turn it upside down. It was almost a pointless performance… no really! Gustav was the final athlete to scrape inside the ‘within 8% of the winners time’ cutoff. Kristian Blummenfelt didn’t even make the grid of the F1 circuit to even start due to illness, while Gustav Iden’s engine misfired, leaving the esteemed pit crew to revisit their big data for answers. Alex Yee running like a gazelle and dominating the first World Triathlon Championship Series event of the year. ‘I’m not going to quit yet’ – Gwen Jorgensen vows to fight on Seemingly able to transition between distances and formats, what was the full script for their new play, The curious case of the shoe in the tri time?Īs a regular theatre-goer myself, let’s speculate and see if we can make some sense of this mystery… Which makes it even more fascinating that when Gustav Iden finished 52nd at the WTCS Abu Dhabi 2023 (which at least wasn’t dead last, as he was at WTCS Leeds 2022…!), they still get headlines. Broadly speaking, they’ve won almost everything. If you are reading this, you’ll not need me to insert the (long) list of success hyperlinks to those championship honours here. If performance should be the factor that drives the narrative, then it’s hard impossible to argue that they haven’t earned their extended time in the spotlights. The truth is, every time I’ve thought that… objectively, every one of those headlines and features has been warranted. Even on these very pages, there have been times when I’ve looked at the homepage of TRI247, and thought, ‘Jeez, there’s a bit of a Norwegian overload going on here!’ In men’s triathlon at least, it’s been pretty difficult to escape the impact that the town of Bergen, and the # HypeTrain have had on the sport over the past two years.
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