This weekend marks the pinnacle of world Duathlon racing. Of course it will get absolutely no publicity whatsoever because Wayne Rooney‘s left toe will be bruised and hence there simply won’t be enough time to cover a minority, unsuccessful sport like duathlon (or triathlon) for that matter.
Then again it’s not surprising because there will be absolutely zero British interest at the World Championships and it will be yet another sport that the British are rubbish at – despite it involving a little bit of sitting down.
And of course we saw from the Olympics that people really only want to watch the team sports like football.
Yes, with shrinking minority sports like Duathlon and Triathlon it really isn’t worth the time.
lol
For the record
Defending Elite Women’s Duahtlon World Champion Kate Hewison from GB will compete. And if anyone from the media reads this she is pretty and eloquent, so no excuse there either for missing an interview.
Age Group and former Age Group Champions like Peter Wheddon and Stuart Hall (former GB international runner) will compete for glory; maybe not at the elite level but they are ‘disabled’ by their age (like me). So are competing at the HIGHEST level possible. (It’s not the paralympics obviously but people seemed to be more than a little bit interested in that as well). In fact people are interested when GB does well…football being the exception (unless a British team is full of good foreign players).
The British Team (including Age Group) will probably be the biggest, yep, even bigger than the host nation’s team (who will be allowed more places as host nation).
The very recent London Duathlon had THOUSANDS of entrants, the largest event of it’s kind in the world. OK not as many as the Great North run but I’m only asking for some coverage and not half a morning’s worth of BBC TV coverage.
Triathlon – Duathlon : Err, when I last looked I thought they were explosively growing sports amongst middle aged, middle class people often with high disposable incomes.
And I will freely admit that two hours watching Age Group or elite Duathlon is not riveting TV (except for the competitors and their families) but I’m sure many British people will have at least a passing interest.
Oh and didn’t we get a gold medal at the olympics for triathlon with HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of people watching at the event (slightly more than Manchester United get at Old Trafford). The Brownlees do duathlon too.
I like the odd football game don’t get me wrong. But the amount of coverage is ridiculous and almost always VERY boring.
Update: Of the 3 people above two gold and one silver…no media coverage.
Update: 10 Gold, 9 Silver, 9 Bronze for Age Group competitors…c’mon BBC it’s not hard, all the info is on the British Triathlon website.
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Hope the race went well for you – it was a great bike course and some transition. Pity about the race medal and lack of post-race party!
My clay medal from Gijon broke in half within 2 days…nice memory 😉
Glad to hear you did well, I did OK thanks. Just have to get some time to write about it. Bizarrely it was not my A race. (Well that’s my excuse anyway as I knew I was not going to get a real medal)