Harrier41 wrote:
he is NOT the World Triathlon Champion!
He is the World JUNIOR champion. BIG BIG difference.
He is talking like an ego fuelled prick, and he left his team i the lurch. He should have waited a few weeks and finished the season like a real sportsman.
One thing I had a hard time finding was this...
http://www.triathlon.org/results/results/2011_dextro_energy_triathlon_-_itu_world_championship_grand_final_beijing/6148/For some reason I was not coming up with a URL for the results until today and had not seen this until right now. Go ahead and look at the results. If you click on "Swim", etc. it will sort the athletes based on their splits in each event in the Tri.
This tells A LOT OF THE STORY. First, for those not familiar, the WC was at a baby distance of HALF the Oly distance (OD is 1500m swim, 40km bike, 10 km run). A top-flight time is about 1:50 for OD and the race distances are not very rigorously measured, even at big events.
There were 63 finishers and 5 DQ/DNF, so 68 at the starting line. I should note that I don't know how they qualify for this, but I am sure you have to as the whole field was pretty tight for a 1:00:00 event.
LV had the 11th best swim split, but was only :11 out of first, so he is right up there in the swim. You can't tell much in the bike, because they are allowed to draft. He was also 11th in the bike (30:16), and only 11th off the best bike split (30:05).
Now you may think, so he is about 10th place right now and :20 seconds back and will use his superior running to nail everyone to win. After all, he should be about a 14:00 5ker and be head and shoulders above everyone there in terms of running, right? Not so fast ...
First of all, it is kind of interesting that ALL TEN of the guys with faster bike splits had slower swim splits than LV (significantly slower -- like :38 to :50 slower in a 9:24 swim). I guess that means that they came in towards the back of the swim leg and tried to make up ground in the bike leg, and through pack riding they WERE able to.
So , due to the very short bike leg distance and the fact that the CAN DREFT, LV was near the lead at the end of the bike leg, about :04 behind the leader, and there were about 10 other athletes within 4 seconds AHEAD or BEHIND as he finished the bike leg.
This is where it gets interesting. If I had never seen the results, I would have assumed that this 3:59 miler and 8:29 2-miler would have put 1-minute on EVERYONE here and won the whole thing.
Triathletes know this, but the swimming is technically the hardest to master, but if you are poor at swimming it is the best one to be poor at (check the results before you disagree), because it is the shortest discipline. In this case 9:20 vs. 30:20 vs. 15:40.
Cycling is the easiest, made even easier by the drafting. In other words the REAL differences that might be revealed in say, an IronMan, are not revealed as much due to the short distance and the drafting. A strong rider CANNOT ride away from the field like a runner might be able to.
Anyway, you look at the run split and he wasn't even the fastest one. He ran 15:33 which we cannot judge absolutely because we have no idea what the length or difficulty of this course was. You CAN judge it relatively though. The fastest run split was ... wait for it ...
TA-DA!
Another American who placed THIRD overall named ... Tony Smoragiewicz!!! Possibly a LESS marketable name than Lukas Verbicas???
I wonder if this much attention has been heaped on Tony Smoragiewicz so far?
My whole long-winded point is that ...
1) This was HALF of Oly Dist, which is the shortest of the major tri specialties (OD, HalfIM, Ironman).
2) When he has to compete at ODist, since he does not seem to be the best swimmer (nor can you gain many seconds there), and you cannot gain time cycling (everyone follows you), he would need to distinguish himself in running.
3) He was winning (did win) by 30+ seconds, draped in a flag, so maybe he soft-pedaled it in the last mile, and he does have what it takes? He certainly has to be the best runner ever to triathlon seriously. At least he has the best middle distance times ever seen.
4) He seems to be determined to be at the very top ... and obviously he knows more about this than I do, but I am not so sure he has the tools.
If you look at the U23 results, they step up to ODist and the winner was faster than him for TWICE THE DISTANCE. Everybody's swim splits were faster, everybody's transition times were faster, everybody's bike speeds were about the same or a little slower, and the run speeds were about the same ... but this was for twice the distance!!
Also, the competition is keener. 20th place in U23 was 2:41 behind the winner, whereas 20th place in Juniors was 1:37 behind first ... for HALF the distance.
5) How can he represent the US in a World Championship if he is not a citizen? I don't care that he did, I am not being a jingoist, I am just wondering? Is this a triathlon thing? All he has that anyone from any other nation does not is a green card and residency status? If someone else moves to Boulder to train and tells the powers-that-be that they intend to become a citizen,(thus increasing their marketability once they do) can they just run in any nation's uniform?
This is strange.