Race favourite withdraws from the 2018 IRONMAN World Championship
Little more than a week after winning his second IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship title in South Africa, courtesy of a performance widely regarded as one of the best ever in our sport, Germany’s Jan Frodeno has today announced that he will not be able to race in Hawaii this year.
The 2008 Olympic Champion made his debut in Kona with a third place in 2014 before winning the IRONMAN World Championship in both 2015 and 2016. Having finished way down the field in 2017 with an injury impacted and painful 4:01:57 run, Jan had re-grouped for the 2018 season and been simply perfect until this point.
His victories at IRONMAN 70.3 Oceanside (over Lionel Sanders), IRONMAN 70.3 Kraichgau (over Patrick Lange), IRONMAN Frankfurt (Lange, Patrick Nilsson) and the 70.3 World Champs (pretty much everyone), had seemingly set him on a mission to ‘seek and destroy’ all of his potential Kona opposition before October, ready to regain the IRONMAN World Championship crown for the third time.
That will have to wait at least another year now, with news from Jan that he has a stress fracture to his hip.