Cup format could make world of difference — it’s worth a tri
Canadians of a certain age watched Simon Whitfield win triathlon’s first Olympic gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Games, cheered his gutsy come-from-behind run to take the silver at Beijing in 2008 and, sadly, witnessed the end of his career, hitting the tarmac on his bike at the 2012 London Games.
But their kids won’t have those experiences and now there’s a whole new set of individual athletes trying to build their stories and create fans with far too few dramatic televised opportunities to do it.
That’s one of the fundamental problems with triathlon that a new race format — borrowing on golf’s successful Ryder Cup — is looking to fix.
The Collins Cup will pit three teams — U.S.A., Europe and the internationals — against each other, turning an individual sport into a team sport.
Each team of12, six women and six men, will compete in staggered individual races of three with points for winning and bonus points available for time margins.
It should add up to a lot of action and, if it comes off as planned, with the athletes and their captains wearing microphone feeds throughout the bike and run portions, provide drama around team strategy and whatever it is that elite athletes suffering through an endurance event might say in reply to a team captain urging them to speed up.
“In a normal triathlon race it’s the whole field and one person wins, and the problem for triathlon is sometimes it’s the middle of the race and that one person is way ahead and no one is ever going to catch them, so the rest of the race seems pretty dull,” said Charles Adamo, chief executive of the Professional Triathletes Organization, which is behind this event.
“What team sports really have is a legacy piece.’’ SIMON WHITFIELD
The inaugural Collins Cup is slated for June 2018 with the location and broadcast partners to be announced this August, he said.
The expected 100-mile distance, a public-friendly round number in the imperial system, works out to a 161kilometre race with a 3K swim, 134K bike leg and 24K run.
Whitfield, recently announced as one of the international captains, loves the format and, most especially, the creation of legacy within the sport of triathlon.
“What team sports really have is a legacy piece. My granddad cheered for the Maple Leafs, my dad cheered for the Leafs. The players were different, but we all cheered for the Leafs,” said Whitfield, who grew up playing street hockey in Kingston, Ont.
“That’s what triathlon has never had . . . your dad doesn’t pass on his team to you.”
With the Collins Cup, triathlon is set to become the latest sport to alter its competition format to create more action, better connect with fans and, most important of all, try to attract the TV broadcasters necessary to grow the sport and pay athletes’ substantial prize money.
Cricket has its popular short form, Twenty20; rugby’s faster, actionpacked game of sevens made its Olympic debut at the 2016 Rio Olympics; in addition to the team-based Ryder and Presidents Cups, golf has GolfSixes, a short, youth-oriented team format; and even tennis is experimenting with Tie Break Tens to appeal to new, younger fans.
And athletics, which suffers many of the same problems triathlon does with little profile outside the Olympic Games, has launched Nitro Athletics, backed by Usain Bolt.
The first event in the points-based team format, which mixes events and male and female competitors, was held this past February in Australia.
The Collins Cup middle distance was picked to make it possible for the Olympic-distance athletes (1.5K swim, 40K bike, 10K run) to stretch and the full Ironman athletes (3.8K swim, 180K bike, 42.2K run) to still be competitive.
“The Olympic distance guys are going to whoop ’em,” Whitfield predicted.
Last month, two-time Olympic champion Alistair Brownlee of Britain won and set a course record in his first-ever attempt at the half-Ironman (1.9K swim, 90K bike, 21.1K run).
Lisa Bentley, another Canadian captain of the international team, is already thinking ahead to how the individual matchups could work and who she’d pit in a race against Brownlee or Germany’s Jan Frodeno, the 2008 Olympic champion and, more recently, two-time Ironman world champion and world record holder.
“Do we want to waste a talent against that or do we put our weakest person there?” Bentley said, noting a lot of race drama will come from the individual matchups and different team strategies.
Eight members of each team will be chosen according to world rankings with the other four left to the discretion of team captains, she said.
“The trouble with triathlon is that everyone is enamoured with it, but it’s boring, so boring to watch,” said Bentley, who won 11 full and 16 halfIronman races in her career while suffering from cystic fibrosis.
“The Collins Cup (format) is going to raise its profile to another level,” she said.
While Canada, which has always punched above its weight in triathlon, warranted two captains on the international team, they’ll be joined by two others in a mini who’s who of the sport.
“We were a little afraid of just having Canadians and it’s a much bigger region,” Adamo said of the international team.
Whitfield and Bentley are joined by Australia’s Craig Alexander, a threetime Ironman world champion, and New Zealand’s Erin Baker, who won an astounding104 of the121races she entered and was instrumental in establishing gender equality and equal prize money in the sport.
The U.S. captains, previously announced, are Dave Scott, a six-time Ironman world champion, and Karen Smyers, an Olympic and Ironman world champion, with a bit of assistance from Brett Favre, the former Green Bay Packers quarterback who has taken up the sport.
The European captains are Chrissie Wellington, a four-time Ironman world champion and record holder for the full distance, and Normann Stadler, a two-time world champion.