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