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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Articles a bit thin on details. Was the previous days severe weather a contributing factor? Was it still rough out?

The article is pretty terrible all around. You have to get to the last sentence before they throw in the detail that it's not actually an Ironman race -- it's a half-iron. I wouldn't mind it so much in a general-interest source, but ESPN writers of all people should know the difference and should sweat even the immaterial details. A "so-called" half-iron? No that's actually what it is. No need for the "so-called".

https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/0820/1400656-cork-ironman/

The weather was very bad, with the tailend of a bad storm that had passed through the previous day

Yeah, that is kind of insulting. Guess people don't realize there are many lengths of triathlons. Fulls and Halfs are typically done together with an extra lap or leg added in for the Full.

Not sure I understand the insult. The article mentioned the distances and called it half ironman (Ironman 70.3 might be more correct, but I think everybody calls that half anyway).

Adding the word to the title doesn't make a huge difference to me "Two men die in Half Ironman Cork competition in Ireland"

Guess wording can be taken in different ways.

>"They were competing in a so-called half Ironman event".

This seemed to indicate it was a lesser event. "so-called". But maybe it was just referring to a type of event. And it was just poor grammar?

Who knows, maybe it was GPT producing the text?

No, it's just pointing out the colloquialism.

"IRONMAN" and "IRONMAN 70.3" are the official names, even though "full" and "half" are how they're commonly referenced.

"so-called" isn't diminutive or derogatory

There's video of competitors marching into waves that appear to be as tall as they are.

I'm not sure under any other circumstances would the competitors have swam (or trained) in waters like that.

Here's an RTE News article on the tragedy. You can see from the photo that yes, it was pretty rough still: https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/0820/1400656-cork-ironman/

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