CAN WE GET MORE TRIATHLETES TO RACE SHORTER EVENTS?

IT MIGHT SEEM crazy to most triathletes now, but back in the days after I retired when I spent much of my time coaching, a lot of the athletes I coached who were getting ready for Ironman Canada would do anywhere from six to eight races through the summer leading up to their full-distance effort. They loved to be part of the racing community and would enjoy seeing their buddies every second week throughout the summer. The non-racing weekends were spent getting some long training done.

As Ironman took off in North America, though, starting with the introduction of Ironman Lake Placid and Ironman Florida in 1999, things started to change. Fast forward about a decade, and a lot of athletes doing an Ironman race were down to a couple of races—they’d do a half-distance race as a tune-up, then hit their full-distance race. One year, the day before the Subaru Triathlon Series’ Milton event, 38 triathletes hit the water for an open-water swim. Not one of them raced the next day.

That makes no sense to Michael D’hulst, the CEO and co-founder of Super League Triathlon.

“If I play golf, I don’t play twice a year,” he says. “I play every weekend.”

When he participated in long-distance events, D’hulst was like the athletes I coached way back when—he did several races throughout the season to hang out with his triathlon community. He wants to bring that philosophy back to the sport. “I want to make short-course cool again,” he says. All of which helps explain the desire to put on the Arena Games event in Montreal last February. I can’t imagine how much it cost to put the event on, but it must have been a lot. The broadcast crew for the racing was huge, not to mention the cost of bringing in all the treadmills and trainers. The vision is to use events like the Arena Games and Super League Triathlon to generate some excitement and get athletes excited to participate in some of the large short-course races the company now owns, including the Malibu, New York and Chicago Triathlons. On a local level, hopefully the excitement generated from the Arena Games helps build participation in Canadian events, too, including the World Triathlon Championship Series race in Montreal this June.

Thanks to a spirited performance by Lionel Sanders, who is typically associated with long-distance racing here in Canada, the Arena Games in Montreal turned out to be a huge success. While everyone was worried he wouldn’t make it to the finals, he ended up doing that with relative ease. He blasted to a sixth-place finish against all the sprinters, setting a new Arena Games bike course record along the way.

I still struggle with the idea that two legs of each race was basically a video game—each heat included a 200-m swim in a 50-m pool, followed by a 4-km bike (on a trainer) and a 1-km treadmill run using the Zwift platform. What I found truly ironic about the Montreal event, though, was that it was a long-course athlete who garnered the lion’s share of the attention at an event designed to generate excitement for short-course racing. Ours wasn’t the only media outlet that found itself in a position where we were highlighting the sixth-place finisher over the rest of the field. We had no choice—that was what people were coming to our site to read.

That’s not a problem, though, if the end goal is met. If we get more people racing short-course events, even if they’re still aiming for an Ironman, that is great. If we generate more attention to athletes like Dominika Jamnicky, who took third, or super-junior Noemie Beaulieu, who made the final, that is great. If Olympic hopefuls like Jeremy Briand, or another super-junior Mathis Beaulieu (no relation to Noemie), who also made the final along with Sanders, also become better known in the triathlon world thanks to the Arena Games experience, that’s a win, too.

Don’t get me wrong, I love long-distance racing. But most of all, I love triathlon—regardless of the distance. Swim, bike and run. (Duathlon is cool, too, but let’s save that for another editorial.) So, I’m with Michael D’hulst. But I’d like to expand on his vision a bit— let’s make all types of triathlons cool again.