If one goal of a triathlon is to provide a balanced test of prowess over its three disciplines many of them don’t succeed. Last weekend, for example, Paula and her sister Adrienne participated in the Taunton Deane Sprint triathlon in Wellington, while Zoe did the Novice event. In both events the results were dominated by performance in the cycling alone – places in the Novice were 95% correlated with how competitors placed in the bike segment, and in the Sprint the correlation was 96%. From a competitive point of view, the events were essentially wet bike races.
There’s no mystery about why this is the case. Look at this chart of each competitor’s times for each of the three legs of the Sprint:
The fastest swimmer gained under 10 minutes from the slowest (see the blue dots), while the fastest cyclist made over 41 minutes over the most recreational bike performance (red dots)…
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