Kristian Blummenfelt and Daniela Ryf won the Ironman World Championship, the first to take place outside Hawaii.
The 2021 Ironman World Championship took place Saturday morning in St. George, Utah. There’s a lot to unpack in that strange sentence, because just about everything going on with this event, which usually takes place in October in Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii, is a little out of sync.
Here’s what we saw in Utah:
Kristian Blummenfelt Adds Another Medal to His Collection.
Kristian Blummenfelt, the Olympic champion, was not one of the top five athletes going into the run portion.
But that lead group knew better than to count out Blummenfelt. He passed runners one by one, taking the lead in the race around Mile 17.
And then Blummenfelt did what he knew how to do: He ran with a ferocity that no one could match. He finished the marathon portion of the event in a staggering 2 hours 38 minutes and 1 second, a pace of 6:02 per mile.
Blummenfelt won the Ironman World Championship with a time of 7:49:16. “That was a tough day,” he said, adding, “Brutal course.”
This was his second time attempting the Ironman distance and his second win. In November, Blummenfelt won the Cozumel Ironman in Mexico, his first attempt at the distance, with a time of 7:21:12.
The race for second place, minutes later, came down to a sprint finish. (Yes, a sprint at the end of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile cycling segment, and a standard 26.2-mile marathon.)
Lionel Sanders of Canada took second place with a time of 7:54:03, and, 17 seconds later, Braden Currie of New Zealand took third.
Daniela Ryf returns to the top of the podium, again.
On the women’s side, Daniela Ryf of Switzerland ran in a familiar position: alone. She ticked off the miles on the roads around St. George, as she raced toward yet another Ironman Championship. Ryf, 34, won her first Ironman World Championship in 2015. She successfully defended her title in 2016. Again in 2017. And once more in 2018.
On Saturday, she took her place back on top — winning the Ironman World Championship with a time of 8:34:59. She flashed her hand at the cameras as she crossed the finished line. “Five!” she shouted. “Five!”
The British athlete Kat Matthews finished in second place in her debut at the world championship with a time of 8:43:49. “I am just speechless,” she said. “I cannot understand how my brain and body were able to push like that.”
Anne Haug of Germany, the 2019 world champion, finished in third place with a time of 8:47:03.
Yes, this was the 2021 event. And, yes, it was in St. George. Let us explain.
The pandemic, which wreaked all kinds of havoc with sports schedules, was a special challenge for Ironman.
The organization, which holds triathlons of varying distances all over the world throughout the year, had to put global racing on hold for months. The 2020 world championships had to be canceled as well.
That is no small matter, since athletes dedicate years of their lives to trying to qualify for Kona, where the race has been held for years. Ironman had hoped to hold its 2021 world championship last October, but Covid-19 surges dashed those plans. Fortunately, St. George, the site of the popular half-Ironman World Championship in September, offered to host a postponed 2021 full Ironman championship this weekend.
“This was a unique opportunity to do something different and make certain we provided a race for athletes who were put on hold and then told to get ready and then put on hold again,” said Diana Bertsch, the senior vice president for world championship events at Ironman.
Has the Ironman World Championship ever happened outside Hawaii?
No. The event has taken place in Hawaii since 1978 and in Kailua-Kona since 1981.
The Utah course was brutal in its own way.
The distance was the same, as always, but the similarities pretty much ended there.
The Kona race starts in the buoyant salt water of the ocean, which is about 79 degrees in October. The St. George swim took place in Sand Hollow Reservoir, where the fresh water was a chilly 59 degrees this week.
The iconic challenges of the Kona course include the intense humidity, which averages 86 percent, and gusts of hot wind up to 60 m.p.h. whipping across the lava fields.
The signature feature of the Utah course was a bike ride that included some brutal climbs through Snow Canyon. It was a breathtaking section of the course for the athletes, but as Bertsch said before the race, “I’m not sure how many of them will be looking around and taking in the scenery at that point.”
The cycling segment included 7,300 feet of climbing, about 1,500 feet more than the Kona course, according to Ironman. The marathon had 1,400 feet of elevation gain, compared with about 900 in Kona.
Many podium finishers described the looping run course as particularly difficult. “It was ridiculously hard, especially the second loop of the run,” Haug said, repeating, “Ridiculously hard.”
The 2022 Ironman World Championship is scheduled for the fall.
These athletes get to line up again sooner than usual. The 2022 Ironman World Championship is properly scheduled for early October in Hawaii.
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