Alan Webb will be participating in his first "high" caliber triathlon in 2 weeks.

WEBB is...

It's a sprint triathlon (draft legal). 51 participants, 20 of which have an ITU ranking (Webb not being one of them). I'm not sure if start list is finalized yet.

Top 3 on start list are Jones (25th in ITU points), Vanort (65th in ITU points) and Hinton (137th in ITU points).

A finish in the top 3 would certainly be a step in the right direction for Webb.

Webb second, just 2 seconds behind Jones and 3 seconds ahead of Vanort.

Pretty amazing. He had a terrible second transition, otherwise he would have won.

Remember that Vanort is the third highest ranked American on the ITU points list.

Is it too early in his development for a Webb to participate in a world triathlon series event? Jones best finish this year in a World Triathlon Series event (London) was 15th.

Vanort's best finish this year (Chicago) was 32nd.

Clearly Webb could participate, but he still needs to improve on the swim. He was over 20 seconds behind Lepage. It's fine in a PATCO event because the chase pack will catch him in the bike segment, but in a World event, there will be a whole pack swimming these times, so the chase pack may never bridge the gap.

Webb is already on the cusp...

Very impressed.

Results with splits:

http://www.sportstats.ca/displayResults.xhtml?racecode=107152

Top ten in swim, top 10 in bike (likely just with the pack), and fastest 5k. Lost the W in the transitions. A little over a second from first to second, but 9 seconds lost on the winner in the transitions.

Why so much lost in transitions?

well, he messes up the bunny ears shoelace thing.

Because this was clearly more of a Canada/USA level triathlon and not a world class triathlon.

should be well planned wrote:

Why so much lost in transitions?

It's pretty cool to see Webb performing well in the tri. It seems like he needs to tweak some things, but once he does...

I'm sure he's going to do great in low stakes events and time trials where he knows he won't have any competition. And then he'll whiff it when it counts.

The other guys have been doing tris for years and have done many more races than Webb has. They are just better at them than he is at the moment. Easy thing to fix though..

Jones is a strong athlete. He's had some top 10's at the WTS level races (top level). So to finish just off of his pace bodes well for Webb. Jones' ranking is a bit low right now because he hasn't raced much this year

rj_tri wrote:

The other guys have been doing tris for years and have done many more races than Webb has. They are just better at them than he is at the moment. Easy thing to fix though..

Jones is a strong athlete. He's had some top 10's at the WTS level races (top level). So to finish just off of his pace bodes well for Webb. Jones' ranking is a bit low right now because he hasn't raced much this year

Given who the competition was, I'm sure Jones was more or less racing for the W here and not really pushing things today.

Probably.. he does have the Commonwealth Games next week and Canada's #2 guy (Andrew Yorke) is already over in Europe preparing for that.

Still.. promising result for Webb

Anyone know if he plans to do a full length tri this year?

2minutemile wrote:

Anyone know if he plans to do a full length tri this year?

What exactly is a "full length tri?"

Karl from Slingblade wrote:

2minutemile wrote:

Anyone know if he plans to do a full length tri this year?

What exactly is a "full length tri?"

Maybe full length try?? Like 'try for the whole length of the race'??

From the video of the finish, I could see a couple of things

1 - Jones still had a lot in the tank

2 - Vanort was quite dejected (oh no... There's a new kid in town... Odds of making it to the Olympics just went down for me...)

Webb is somewhere between the 2 right now. Way ahead of LV.

Is the sprint triathlon an Olympic event? Can we conclude that Webb has a good chance of competing in Rio? I'm stoked.