Peter Reid’s Hall of Fame Year
a very Kona-centric problem. Unless you’re going to be riding on the Big Island or, say, Lanzarote, on a regular basis, you’ll probably be fine.
The water bottle storage was easy to get used to as well. You’ll never have any reason not to head out with two or three water bottles on your bike. While the bike is a bit heavier than the P5, you don’t really notice the extra weight or the fact that you’ve got three water bottles along with you.
Loughlin had wanted the engineers at Cervélo to listen to the athletes she spent so much time with before they built their next bike. They did that and a lot more, coming up with a very different bike. Ironically, the P5X looks a bit like the original concept bike Gerard Vroomen and Phil White, the founders of Cervélo, came up with in the ’90s during a quest to build the fastest bike in the world. The P5X is the logical next step in the process – instead of worrying about a fast bike, they’ve come up with a fast system that includes not only the bike and rider, but the f luids and nutrition needs required for a long-distance triathlon event. It’s been quite a year for Peter Reid, the man we put on our very first cover of Triathlon Magazine Canada in March, 2005. We profiled the three-time Kona champ when he was inducted into Triathlon Canada’s Hall of Fame – an honour that he’d been offered many years ago but chose to pass on. It wasn’t until Triathlon Canada president Tim Wilson made a personal trip out to see Reid that he was finally convinced to accept.
In October Reid was inducted into the Ironman Hall of Fame, too, along with former Ironman president, Lew Friedland. It was Friedland who really charted Ironman’s global expansion starting in 1999 with the creation of events in North America (that was the year Ironman Lake Placid and Ironman Florida started up), Europe (Ironman Austria) and Asia (Ironman Malaysia). Over the ensuing few years even more races were brought into the Ironman schedule, including events in France, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Australia and Korea. The rapid global expansion of Ironman racing was due to Friedland’s vision. In an interview with Friedland in 2000, when asked why he felt Ironman racing was ready for such an aggressive expansion, he said “Ironman is where marathon running was in the late ’70s and ’80s.”
Reid’s exploits are, of course, well known to us here in Canada. In addition to his three Kona wins he took seven other titles, including a sprint to the line win over Chris Legh in 1998.