Swim. Bike. Cheat?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
It's a very ego-driven sport. You get a lot of rich mid-life crisis types, generally uber Type-A Captains of Industry who achieve professional success and then are like "now what, what is my next feather in my cap?" ... the answer is Ironman/Kona. These dudes would drop 15k on a tri bike, swag it out 3 different sets of race wheels, rollers, power meter, carbon everything, $600 a month for the coach, $250 a month for the gym, $300 for pool fees and swim stroke clinics, $350 for yoga classes, $500 a month for massages, 20k per season for race entry fees and travel to races, training camps, etc etc etc.
I always advise to single women who want to meet rich dudes to join a tri club. My tri club alone had like 5 marriages in the time I trained there.
Anyway, fun sport, but I couldn't take the egos. I've found ultrarunning to have a much more down to earth and friendly crowd.
Every time I've heard that in the past, the sport has been completely filthy.
http://www.irishtriathlon.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/iro...
Famously, Mary Decker Slaney was busted for having an illegal T/E ratio. She disputed it by claiming that contraceptive drugs altered her hormones, but the IAAF upheld her ban.
This of course also helps with the narrative of "I won because I trained super hard", some people are genetically blessed to be able to absorb large training volumes without getting injured or burning out, for the others there are plenty of things one can use to achieve similar effects
This is also why unfortunately some coaches seem to go through athletes quite a bit until they find some that can take the workload, and focus on those, not so good though for the ones that ended up getting injured and out of the sport though.
I do think the news tend to portray doping too much as "race day doping" when the biggest gains are made in the offseason, and this is why there are rules like offseason testing where athletes have to inform the anti-doping agencies where they are at all times, and why it raises a lot of questions when some countries don't seem to have effective offseason anti-doping controls.
If this was a computer game, people would deem you a "casual".
From a sports perspective all of the age groupers have my deep respect. Again, most of them are nice guys. But this sport also attracts people I do not like. Too loud, too much bragging, too stylish.
For those down-thread wondering if this is a witch-hunt, I've followed it in detail and if you know the sport the evidence of cheating is very clear. She has been singled out in the sense there are other cheats out there (I've seen it myself) but her high profile fairly reflects the callibre of events she's won (ITU long course).
I'll probably get back into it because there is lots I miss about training, I just needed a break and have been enjoying the ultra scene for now.
I used to feel sorry for doctors who paid a lot of malpractice insurance, and wanted to give them tort reform. I thought they deserved protection.
But when doctors sell out for money, I could care less about helping them out. It's not so much that they are dispensing HGH, steroids, etc., I imagine the doses are low, and the wealthy patient sees nothing, but placebo effects.
It's the money part. I really don't like doctors whom sell out for money.
I have stayed in touch with the sport, and it’s especially filthy amongst the age-groupers. They have no financial motivation not to cheat: They are already well-off and won’t lose a penny of sponsorship money if they get caught.
Furthermore, many come from the world of business, where cheating is a fact of life. You do a certain thing, if you get caught, you hire lawyers and fight and/or bargain your way to the least unfavourable outcome.
What is the difference between offshoring your tax avoidance and visiting a shady doctor for a prescription? This is especially true when it reaches a certain tipping point where “everybody cheats.”
Like many things in life, there are two sets of rules: One for those with a lot of money, who sit on the board of their local club and/or sponsor the racing scene, and another for those who ride purely for fun.
For a certain type of middle-aged type-a male, it is about being the “Alpha” in the scene, and that means winning your age group at all costs, having your business’s name splashed over everything in sight, and that means being a part of the power elite within the sport itself.
I’m no longer a part of the multi-sport scene, I switched to mountain biking, where I thought I’d find a laid-back outdoorsy California vibe.
It is there, if you look past the guys with a “quiver” of six or seven carbon-fibre bikes :-)
It's not definite from your phrasing, but based on the parallel to sports I'm assuming you view this attitude negatively. Have you managed to find a business niche that isn't prey to this? Have you found a way to make peace with this without feeling that you've given up your sense of morality? This is something I struggle with.
This is interesting, because it tells me that no matter how crooked the business sector, there is some company so awful that that puts all the others to shame. And there is another out at the other end that has good people trying to do good things.
If you're looking for a job, you can only work for one company, so that provides some hope: You just need to find that positive outlier. And if they are also successful and not crippled by attempts to stay sane in an insane world, you'll be fine.
It's much the same as with startups. Lots are absolute nonsense, conceived with the purpose of extracting money from a gullible market for investments in hot technology.
But you don't have to work for or with any of them, you just have to find the people who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place in a way that fits with what you have to offer.
as far as i can tell this is permanently gone from california. we are now all hyper-capitalists living in a weird socialist-leaning statist bureaucracy.
i grew up here but i'm thinking of moving somewhere else. the problem is there are only 3 states on the west coast and washington is basically turning into california 2.0
At spirit, ultrarunning is the polar opposite of tri- laid back, get it done fast or slow, have a beer after (or during...), most importantly, stop and help others, thank volunteers midrace, etc. That has been my experience thus far.
But money's seeping into the sport through sponsorships and purses, so let's not be naive - cheating is probably already happening (haven't seen it firsthand so I can't say it definitively), and it's to the point that influential voices in the sport are trying to figure out what to do about it.
[0] http://www.irunfar.com/2015/12/doping-and-the-effect-on-ultr... [1] http://running.competitor.com/2015/12/news/ultrarunning-at-a...
(I can't find the fairly provocative piece from mid-2015 nor can I remember who wrote it, help anyone?)
An anecdote: I went to see my buddy run a 50 miler in the Charlottesville VA area a few weeks ago. I remember being told how great the race was a few years ago - cheap, fun, great afterparty. This year, entry fees were much higher, the post-race spread was more or less nonexistent... signs of nickel-and-diming everywhere.
I suspect that's fairly common now- RD's looking to make a profit through their racing companies.
I've LOVED it. The majority of the ultra runners are kooky/cool/fun and interesting people. I was pleasantly surprised to find people of ALL body types and ages finishing 50 and 100 mile races as well. Here is a great article about Mirna Valerio, a 250lb ultrarunner:
http://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/ultra
Harrier Hash is another very fun running club to check out.
I would say a good way to get started is to check out volunteering at some races, see if you like the vibe. There are some aid stations at Western States every year that are a lot of fun.
The PCTR races are fun and low key and a good way to start out in the sport. My best advice to to stay within yourself and have fun with the training and the races. Listen to your body and if it needs a break give it a break, build up to ultra miles slowly, your body will think you for it.
>"Cyclists do not wear timing chips in the Test of Metal; they affix numbers to the front of their bikes. Miller’s somehow became detached from her bike in the 2015 race, the only such incident among more than 800 competitors"
With most wrecks it's really hard to have the center of the handlebars impact something in a scraping motion, but I've had a hard wreck in a race sending my bike tumbling through a stream into the side of a hill and the worst damage to the number was getting covered in mud. The number tag was essentially shoveling mud yet stayed perfectly intact.
If you look at her finishing picture there isn't even zip-ties left. No number = DNF.
The image at the top of the piece shows her chip at her ankle, below her wetsuit. Unless you plan on losing your chip, you ALWAYS wear the chip higher up so your wetsuit covers it, making it harder to come off in the swim when other swimmers grab your ankles.
A tangent of the article also mentions the use of an invented marathon to fill a gap in the achievement list of an ambitious runner. In the early boom years of road cycling, claiming wins in bogus races was so commonplace that avoiding that kind of CV hacking was the main driver in the formation of official regulations and organizations like UCI, afaik.
While Lorz had used a car as a quick fix, Hicks had used, well, a quick fix. His trainer afterwards admitted they had decided "to inject him with a milligram of sulphate of strychnine and to make him drink a large glass brimming with brandy". Hicks then "set off again as best he could". But one hit was not enough. "He needed another injection four miles from the end to give him a semblance of speed and to get him to the finish."
Hicks kept his medal, a decision possibly influenced by the embarrassment Lorz had already caused. The leniency also reflected the fact that doping, and strychnine abuse in particular, was commonplace at the time. Now the drug seems so archaic that Hicks's story has a certain twisted humour. But the ramifications of its use were just as obnoxious as those of HGH and steroids are today.
http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2008/may/30/drugsinsport.ol...
Cyclists do not wear timing chips in the Test of Metal; they affix numbers to the front of their bikes. Miller’s somehow became detached from her bike in the 2015 race, the only such incident among more than 800 competitors.
What are the chances that the fastest athlete loses their chip in not just one race but three? You'd think after the first instance the athlete would be more rather than less vigilant, although perhaps not if they are no consequences. Although it might seem unfair to the occasional real winner who loses their chip, equating "No chip" with "Did not finish" seems like a safer practice.
In the case that a real winner is disqualified, they still know that they were capable of winning the race, and (unless they have fantastically bad luck with velcro and twist ties) will likely will go on to win other races. But reinstating a potential cheater is demoralizing to everyone else, and unless there is a correlation between going fast and losing chips, many of the reinstatements are going reward fraudulent behavior.
(Full, ludicrous, disclosure: I once took shortcuts on the Marine Corps Marathon course; but I was following the pack. The finishers' certificates for the 1980 race went out with a finish time and an estimated adjusted time.)
If the article's facts are correct, someone cheated, got caught and punished/banned. The article doesn't have much more (hand waiving, ends in "no clue what she did").
This sentence reads like harassment to me: "In several email exchanges, on the telephone, and in a brief conversation at the front door of her house in Squamish, Miller declined to be interviewed for this article"
Though there are too many facts against Miller:
- Photographers have not seen her twice on the running laps
- Competitors have not seen her
- The photo evidence of 1.4/13.8 mile running checkpoint shows that she was there in ~86 minutes from bike finish. Either she crawled those 1.4 miles or she had a rocket pack on her back as the best male result for 13.8 mile run was 90 minutes.
- If she really would've seen after the bike stage, that she is missing her timing chip, she or her assistant (if she had one) would've informed competition staff. Because competitors know 'no chip - no time, means disqualification'.
- Not giving GPS data of her Garmin sports watch (athletes of this level save their sports data and log in their diaries religiously, and they simply 'not loose it' or their 'dogs eat it'). If you are clean, you will happily show your GPS logs, easiest proof and everybody is happy.
One of the things that I didn't like about the article is that it doesn't provide Davis' reported times. Quote, emphasis added:
> Davis, who comes from Carlsbad, Calif., and is one of the top triathletes in her age group in the world, had been first out of the water and first off her bike — she was sure of it.
It would be fairly easy, and more transparent, if the author would have simply provided the data from other competitors to compare against the times that Miller had registered from before the marathon portion.
About Miller's cycling end-time. As it seems, there is no photographic evidence of Miller at that checkpoint, to me, that suggests that either A) the time is correct and she took a 60-75min break from the competition, or B) had an accomplice take the chip to the check-in before her actual arrival time.
The former is the more likely explanation assuming that is when(if) she tampered with the device. She would have needed time to get out of eyesight, lose the device, and then, have a rest.
The latter would be more insidious, but shouldn't be too hard to rule out. There are records for every competitor at the location, and the volunteers there should be recorded too; I would imagine coaches and bystanders are roped off from the area. Did any of people have a close association with Miller?
Although, that may be beside the point because she has had several questionable past events. You could look at these other events to see if there is a correlation of volunteers or if Miller's time pairs too closely to another competitor would be extraordinary.
EDIT: It hadn't occurred to me until after writing this up that there's another possibility, in support of Miller's claim. That is, the chip could have been found by another competitor and delivered to that checkpoint. I believe the article states that Miller explains that it was lost between changing from the swim portion to the biking section.
This woman has apparently been fairly well proven a cheater. And if you regularly cheat in order to win a relatively major sporting event, you run the risk of the New York Times writing an article about it -- and maybe sending you a few e-mails or knocking on your door to get your side of the story.
The people who deserve sympathy are those racers who played by the rules but got fucked out of a spot in higher-level races because of this woman. And the people who actually won those races but didn't get to enjoy their moment of celebration at the top of podium. Small things, maybe, but nevertheless it's shitty that those experiences were stolen from people who worked very hard for them.