A bit of ancient history, that many on this thread may be too young to remember: this would be a much more interesting conversation if a Canadian bureaucrat named Les McDonald had not f*cked up the sport of Olympic/ITU triathlon. Against the will of the athletes, he decreed that drafting on the bike would be legal (he also wanted the swimmers to have to climb up on raft/pontoons and jump back in the water during the swim, which supposedly would make it more interesting for spectators - lucky he didn't succeed in forcing that half-*ssed idea onto the sport!). If he had not turned olympic triathlon into "draftathon," it would have been a much more interesting and exciting sport: the fastest cyclists coming off the bike in the lead and battling to hold off the fastest runners, etc.... And to run as fast as the guys you mentioned after doing a really hard non-drafting bike would be amazing. Unfortunately, in draftathon, there was little reason to put out a lot of effort in the bike, so a huge pack would come into transition together, and then the fastest runner would win - it became a sort of running race with a warmup, but the best tri runners were not as good as the best pure T&F runners (an exception: Carol Montgomery from Canada). In the early days, the fastest swimmers would get out of the water but then wait for other swimmers to finish in order for them to have a pack to bike with (see Sheila Taormina in Olympic race), and it would be incredibly boring to watch the bike leg, as nobody wanted to take the lead. To the credit of the athletes, it's now become somewhat better, with lead cycling packs in some races working together well and going pretty fast in a paceline. But I haven't seen a superior cyclist (who was a solid runner but not the best in the field) ever win a draftathon and, imho, it will never be the kind of exciting event a real (non-drafting) triathlon would have been. This is not the fault of the athletes, who've done their best to maximize their abilities in the sport that has been handed to them. Given the draftathon format, it is not at all surprising that the athletes you mentioned can run nearly the same times after a drafting pack bike that they can in an open running race.