The bike course in Kona last October prompted some spectacular blow-ups on the run – but Norwegian duo Kristian Blummenfelt and Gustav Iden reckon things could be even more brutal when the men’s IRONMAN World Championship moves to Nice this year.
The former IRONMAN World Champions have spent the last few weeks at a training camp in Nice, getting to know the bike course they’ll face on September 14.
Record times on the bike were obliterated in Hawaii, most notably by Sam Laidlow – who took more than seven minutes off his own course record as he became the first man to go under four hours. No fewer than six others also went below the previous mark.
On the run things would go spectacularly wrong for Laidlow – and others – as a brilliantly measured 2:37 marathon from Patrick Lange saw him slice through the field, having started nine minutes back in ninth, en route to an emphatic third title.
Pace is key to Nice course says Blummenfelt
So will things be much more measured on the far hillier and more technical course around Nice?
Definitely not according to Blummenfelt and Iden!
And that’s because Blummenfelt reckons you simply can’t afford not to be near the front if you want to win the race, highlighting what happened the last time the men’s IMWC was held on the French Riviera.
On that say Laidlow had a very different experience to Kona as he again drilled it on the bike but had more than in enough in hand – both in terms of energy reserves and advantage to the rest – when it came to the run.
Speaking in the latest Santara Tech podcast (full version embedded below) Blummenfelt said: “It’s an interesting bike course, a challenging one and it can create a lot of gaps if you have the pace wrong.
“I guess we will see [something] like what happened in 2023 with Sam just going from the front and then every man for himself trying to stay with him and the stronger riders.
“There’s definitely a lot of stronger guys who will just put the power in and I don’t think it’s going to be the sort of course where you can just sit in a group. You definitely have to follow the pace.”
Tough to play catchup on the run
In contrast to the bike, the four-lap run course is pan flat and ‘Big Blu’ doesn’t think it will shake things up as much as Kona tends to.
He explained: “Of course if you’re doing a 2:30 marathon you can maybe catch 5, 10, 15 minutes to the guys in front but if you’re further back than that it’s going to be very hard to run yourself onto the podium.
“Patrick [Lange, who was second, four minutes behind Laidlow] in 2023 I think he did a 2:30 run [it was 2:32] and it wasn’t enough to catch Sam who was putting the hammer down on the bike. So you can catch up a little bit but it’s not the same as in Kona I think.”
And Iden pointed out another intriguing aspect about the bike course – just how tricky it is to know where you are in relation to the front of the race if not in that leading group.
He said: “On the bike it’s very, very hard to really know where you are. And from what I understand most people didn’t have too much information during the bike ride [in 2023].
“In Kona at least you have the halfway point and you can see people are coming towards you. So you have at least some information as to what’s happening.
“But in Nice most of the [bike] course is hard for spectators to get to if they want to watch the run.
“So the bike course will be pretty difficult to gauge. Of course if you are in the front pack, which I train to be in, that’s okay but if you are coming from behind it’s basically impossible to know where the front is.”
