Mathletics by John D. Barrow

Author:John D. Barrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

58

The Equitempered Triathlon

The triathlon is the newest sport in the Olympic Games. Despite appearing first in the 2000 Games in Sydney, it was only invented in its modern form in 1978 by a group of runners from the San Diego Track Club, who staged an event for forty-six intrepid souls who wanted to subject themselves to a swim, a bike ride, and a distance run with no rest between.1 Later that year, an even fiercer “Ironman” test was created in Honolulu, with a 2.4-mile (3.9 km) swim plus a 112-mile (180.2 km) ride, and a marathon (42.2 km) run to finish. Remarkably, all but three of the fifteen starters finished, led home by Gordon Haller just 11 h 46 m and 58 s after he started. There are several versions of the triathlon now (the shortest being the “Sprint” event with a 750m swim, 20km ride, and 5km run), but we will confine our attention to the standard Olympic event. For both men and women, it starts with a 1.5km swim, then a 40km bike ride, followed by a 10km road run. The winner is determined by the first to the overall finish line, that is by the shortest time when the times for the swim, ride, and run are added together with the two (short) transition times needed to switch from one discipline to the next.

The times for each of the Beijing medal winners is shown in the two tables below, with the split times for each of the three disciplines, together with the fastest time recorded for each stage by any competitor (note the first three times don’t add to the total because the two transition times must be added).

The obvious question to ask about this event is whether the relative lengths of the swim, ride, and run stages are fairly chosen. Some triathletes are primarily runners, others naturally swimmers or cyclists, and the amount of time they have to exploit any advantage they have on their strongest discipline at the expense of their weakest is crucial for their overall performance. As the rules stand, the winning man spent a mere 16.7% of his total time swimming, 28.3% of it running, 0.8% of it in transitions, and a whopping 54.2% of it cycling. The fractions of time spent on the different legs are roughly the same as this for the women and the other men.

These numbers appear rather shocking. There is clearly an imbalance in this event, with far too much weight being placed upon the performance in the cycling. An outstanding cyclist has more time to exploit his strength than the runners and swimmers combined.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.