Here’s some drone footage https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=793010939172763
The start doesn’t look as bad as the other video, but you can see it knocks a few people down. You can see from the turnaround that people have gone off course and are swimming into each other.
I was asked to swim over five athletes a few times at a pool session, last year to prep them! Awks.
further to my previous ‘campaigns’, there was some joker (a bloke unsurprisingly) on the LakesMan thread bigging up the mass start swim ‘biff’ this yr. Unbelievably no-one called him out, and folks were rolling along with it (in this weird present day culture where no-one dare say anything negative in case it makes someone feel bad???). So I had to!
someone’s already mentioned there was a more sheltered harbour?
come on teejay, if a numpT like me can do it OK. You can ACTUALLY sw1m FGS
victims have been named - but look at the comment
“Ivan Chittenden, from Toronto in Canada, was named as one of the victims, with the 65-year-old having decided to participate in the event whilst on holiday in Ireland. The second victim, 44-year-old Brendan Wall, was originally from Ireland and had travelled over from his home in Solihull, England to compete.”
ETA:
There was a death at the Ocean Lake tri at Leybourne in 2015, 400m easy to follow square route in flat, clear, lake with 100 triathletes at most. Not sure they ever found a definitive reason.
Took them ages to find him as well.
Epilepsy. Bloke was a novice and didn’t declare his condition and sadly had a fit in the water and drowned. Wasn’t spotted at the time as it happened in the mass swim start.
So both were 70.3 entrants.
I’m not sure the Canadian could have paid entry the day before, and not sure we can assume he was completely untrained.
In that situation, there’s only 1 thing left to do…
the only thing we can assume from the report is his name, his country, his age and he was on holiday
Im a confident, allbeit very wary swimmer (you may not believe but was scared shitless of water until I was 8 when i finally learned to swim, then i flipped 180 but still have that underlying but heathy wariness)
Anyway 2009, the first ever WTS at Hyde Pk I did the Oly. They started us off behind a pontoon, probably 250 minimum of us, but the first turn was less than 100m away at best. 90degree turn right, you can imagine the carnage. I went to breathe, got dunked, no worries 2 more strokes, boom same again, fuck, 1 stroke breathe right, bang another, i start to think about self preservation now, no room people everywhere, roll onto back, that’s what I’ll do. Nope, swam over and was under water, still having not taken a breath. It was at the point that the space opened up because a canoe was now there. Took a breath carried on but that canooist noticed me, and who knows, i may have been fine but… At the 2011 Olympic test event they started from the pontoon!
Awful, i remember as it was our club champs as well. Awful day, felt for Alan (iirc) the club chair at the time, not his fault but if it was my club event i organised id have felt massive guilt
He certainly appears to be a triathlete, he’d done IM Cork in 2019 - where the swim was cancelled.
appears to be a pretty solid ~43 min half swimmer, none of the others were sea swims though.
Ultimately it’s a swim in the north Atlantic; you’ve got to expect a choppy swim.
If you can’t launch or land the safety craft with any degree of safety then I doubt you’d get the event past many risk assessments…
Just spoke with a mate who did the full. Solid swimmer, but not much sea swimming. Mostly open water.
Swim was challenging, but do-able. At no point was he concerned for his safety.
Exited the swim to see a guy being given CPR at the swim exit.
My mates wife and kids were at T1 waiting for him to come out. Proper stressful.
Faaark, that’s horrendous.
Doesnt look so bad there