AustrAliAn triAthlete | 29TIM DON
I
grew up in a place called
Tennington in West London where
I started swimming with a squad.
There was a group of swimmers
that always swam after us and they
were older and faster. I would always
hear the coach shouting at this guy that
would run halfway down the pool deck
and dive in. The athlete turned out to
be Spencer Smith who in 1992 was the
ITU World Champion and won multiple
championships. I grew up in his backyard
and I remember once he turned up in this
gangster Mercedes and had this fluorescent
pink Specialized bike, and I thought: “Wow,
triathlon! I can ride a bike!” That’s what
first sparked my interest in the sport.
As a kid, I went to a good running
school and my running club was
loaded with talented runners. I was in a
group with Mo Farah and I used to train
with him twice a week when he was
around 13 and I was around 16. There were
another two boys that I trained with that
medalled at the European Junior Champs
and the other went to the Commonwealth
Games for distance running. It was a
hotbed of track and field. I loved running,
but I was only the third-best runner in my
school and the fourth best in my region.The second triathlon I did was a
local duathlon and I finished fifth.
Stuart Hayes, who’s still a pro today, told
me that the top six get selected for the
European Championships. I ended up
getting sixth and he got seventh and they
selected me even though it was only my
second ever multi-sport race. I got to go to
Finland to the European Championships
as a youth competitor. I ended up getting
fourth there a month later. I loved the
travelling aspect because we didn’t
get to travel like that with track and
cross-country.
Going through the junior circuit,
I realised I really enjoyed triathlon and I
was very competitive. You have
pipedreams that this could be your career.
If I had told myself back then, I will be 39
and break the Ironman World Record,
I wouldn’t have believed myself. The defining
moment for me was in 1998 when I won
the World Junior title because I had been
second at the European Championships
and I really needed to win to get that step
up. I had decided if I didn’t win, I was going
to go to University and study Marine
Biology. I did win and then I got invited to
do the St. George Formula One over the
winter, which sent me up for a winter out
of Europe. I started racing Senior World
Cups, got a couple of top 10 finishes, and
the rest is history.
When I first started racing, I wanted
to win the World Championships and
then Kona like Greg Welch. In 1998, they
announced they were going to make
triathlon an Olympic sport in 2000, which
I had dreamed about. But we had Simon
Lessing, Spencer Smith, Andrew Johns,
Richard Allen, Stuart Hayes - the list goes
on, and I was still a junior at the time, so I
wasn’t proven yet. In 1999 I had some
good races and in 2000 I won the first
selection raced called Windsor. That win,
along with my sixth at the European
Championships, put me at the top of the
Brits who hadn’t pre-qualified, so I got the
third slot for the Sydney Olympics.
Every Olympic experience was
different, but Sydney in 2000 was the
most amazing for me. I was one of the
youngest guys and got 10th, which
outperformed my expectations for my
federation. I just had a ball because the
Aussies loved the triathlon race. The crowds
were three deep and the Sydney Opera
House was behind you as you rode
through the streets. For me, the Athens
Olympics in 2004 was a unique course
and countries started to use domestiques,
so we planned lots of my training with
heavy running and swimming. I set myself
up for a good race there with a good swim,
but I got blown out the back door by theKiwis on the bike, ran myself up into fourth
and blew up and finished back.
Three days before the Beijing
Olympics race, I got food poisoning
and was severely compromised. I still
raced, but I was three kilograms under-
weight. Being in fantastic shape at that
time and knowing I had beaten the guys
who got medals, it was very hard for me at
the time. I suffered for about five or six
months afterwards. I had put four years of
my life into one race to have something out
of my control cost me the best chance I had
at my age. Fate played a cruel hand there.
I always wanted to race full-
distance triathlons and the 70.3s as
they became bigger. After Beijing, our
federation decided to take a domestique
to the London Olympics. I didn’t want to
put four more years of my life into being a
domestique. I believe triathlon is an
individual sport so that’s when I came to
another crossroad in my career and
decided, with my wife Kelly, I would need
to make some changes to race long
course. We had our daughter, Matilda, and
I didn’t want to spend a lot of time away
from them, training and racing, so I got in
touch with my now manager, Franco, and
we moved to Boulder, Colorado so I could
live and train here year round. We moved
over on a wing and a prayer in April of 2013
and have been here ever since.ITU DAYS: 2011 Dextro Energy Triathlon - ITU
World Championship Series London.
MAIN IMAGE: A new Ironman course world
record is set at Ironman Brazil, May 2017.© Fernanda Paradizo/Shutterstock.com© ITU Media/Janos M. Schmidt