Thursday February 19th 2009 Olympic Triathlon

Having watched the Olympic Triathlon races (plus other I.T.U. events) it became apparent (certainly in the men?s race) that none of the main contenders came to the fore until the run section. Turning the event into a 1500m-swim/40k-bike warm up followed by a 10k running race.
Okay so that?s a slight exaggeration, you still have to stay in contention with the main pack during the swim and bike legs to give yourself a chance. Now, what if the athletes had an incentive to be first out the swim or to be leading during the bike leg.
My suggestion is to introduce bonus points for first out of the swim and at the 10k ? 20k ? 30 k ? 40k points during the bike leg. These bonus points would be in the form of a time bonus i.e. for the first three out of the swim you could have a 30 ? 20 ? 10 second time bonus. Likewise on the bike you would have time bonuses every 10k. This would cause a dilemma for the competitors, do you potentially give someone a 2.5 minutes start on the run and hope you can run them down. Or do you go for the time bonus and hope you can hang in there during the run. This idea might be an headache for the competitors but when I am sitting at home in my comfortable chair with my feet up it would make even better viewing than it does now.

Posted by Lynn Ferris at 13:35 GMT