That’s the one. I got fed up trying to swim against the current to get to the lap turn around - I’d already been swimming for an hour - so gave up and headed to the beach instead and had a DNF.
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Did anyone do the ETU race at Rimini? The wind was offshore and the buoy broke loose so we ended up swimming further and further out chasing this buoy until the they could get a boat out to us and tell us to turn around.
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The duathlon was in Rimini a couple of times and the wind and rain made the coast road treacherous one year because they have repainted all the road markings…
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well I always thought he was a robotic machine of all round invincibility 
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Fit fit guy
He won several ultra fit comps i did in the 90”s
Sub 9 Ironman at 50? Always at the sharp end, I remember reading a “ blog” type thing he did years ago, he said he had some form of panic attack virtually every race.
No idea if it got easier as he did more swimming .
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Looks pretty tough to me. Beyond the entry that’s still hard work to get through the water and see where you’re going. But not unswimmable. Similar to Barca 2021 which was shortened to 900m
I’d expect Ironman would rely on external authorities for safety decisions as they do on the bike course.
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It can be. Assigning blame is difficult if they can’t do real root cause analysis.
The bloke who died while I was in the water at Cascais in ‘22, there were no extenuating circumstances. Harbour swim, pretty straight forward and lots of canoes.
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Speculation from what I read somewhere was that the decision on where the swim was going to be (moved from a different bay or something) to how long it was going to be was quite last minute. And the safety canoes were struggling in the rough sea.
A comment from that thread:
I COMPETED IRONMAN CORK 2023.this is my views as a strong open water swimmer in Ireland.The problem was When we got off the beach, we were pushed futher away from the furthest Red turning bouy on the right looking out. When eventually, i made it 5/6 meters from bouy, an on the water discussion,was made to turn everyone around. It became obvious on the water, that they had a serious problem and they tried to damage limitate as best the could.Not all people could hear this, hence, you had a the front swimmers, turning back into oncoming swimmers with 1 meter high waves.I stopped to enable the congestion to easy, and commented to a nearby swimmer " this is madness".We then had no choice,but to fight our way through congestion, hitting feet in front, kicking upper bodies behind me.I was annoyed at the amount of water, I was swallowing, as I couldn’t get buoyant in this turmoil.My heart went out to any inexperienced swimmers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/15wbyud/comment/jx3qqs7/
That looks like rough conditions to me for a race. If you’re going in for a random splash it’d be fine but with the intensity of the race, more people around you = not fun.
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Some of the swimmers decided to turn around by themselves and swam into other swimmers? Unclear from that post what was happening.
All the more reason to have at least some OW experience in rough conditions, and to have had swam that distance at least?
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Yeah not clear who said to turn around, but people were swimming into one another is a nightmare…
@toby_Hole_in_the_leg sure and also get a group of 10 of them and dunk each other, swim over legs etc. I was in a race the other week and the guy behind kept grabbing my foot (about 4 times). I had to stop and let the idiot go past 
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should be used to that in a pool… 
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Good point all IM training should involve going to public swimming sessions!
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All part of the fun. I liked the argy bargy.
Yeah 
exactly swimming pool conditions!
My old coach used to put 8 in a lane to replicate exactly that.
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8 isn’t enough! You’d need 3 setting off in the same lane together. I am lucky because I can out sprint most of the chaos 
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Felt like plenty with those windmilling Aussie fish 
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