It’s Day 2 of the Sub7 and Sub8 race week! By now, all of our athletes and pacemakers have had a chance to cycle on the Dekra Lausitzring, the main venue for the audacious attempt. One common reaction: “It’s fast!”
Pho3nix Foundation board member, MANA Global CEO, and four-time triathlon world champion Chris “Macca” McCormack has been on-site observing the athletes interact with the course. “This track is fast, it’s the fastest circuit in the world, that’s why we picked it… Germany always has fast roads; these are faster than the fastest so these records are going to tumble,” he said. “The track is super-fast even with conditions like today. I think today’s wind is about 13 kilometres per hour – it’s quite windy – and they’re still sitting at 47, 48 kilometres per hour relatively comfortably on the track.”
Sunday June 5th is shaping up to be the likely date of the race, with a temperature of 24 degrees Celsius and prevailing winds of 4 kilometres per hour: ridiculously fast.
Macca added, “The science and technology that has gone into this, in particular the team of Alistair Brownlee’s that have now been picked up by Joe Skipper – that team is next-level. The aerodynamic work they’re doing, they rode around here in a test set yesterday. They believe they’ll sit on 55 kilometres per hour for 180k. You do the math.”
Today also marked the first of the daily Facebook Live shows from the venue featuring interviews and previews of the race to come. For the first time since the news broke about Alistair’s withdrawal from the race, we sat down together with Kristian Blummenfelt and Joe Skipper.
Joe admitted, “The first I heard about it was when Chris told me about it a couple of days ago. It was completely unexpected really. I just thought it was a good opportunity, I would like to give it a crack. I’ve got nothing to lose. There was a bit of hesitation because I wasn’t expecting to be doing this; I was supposed to do a half distance the following day [after being asked to race Sub7].”
Despite initial statements in jest pretending not to know who Joe is, Kristian revealed he follows Joe’s exploits on Youtube and on the Triathlon Mockery podcast. He said, “It is cool to have him stepping in now. Of course it’s a shame with Alistair getting injured, but it’s so much better to have a team that you are racing against and that can push us. I also know that he is getting a strong bike team that say they will smash us on the bike. That’s obviously firing up my bike team and they for sure want to ride fast.”
Bike effort and strategy are also a major part of how the women’s race is shaping up as Nicola Spirig and Kat Matthews discussed in their joint sit-down.
Kat said, “I think for this event it will genuinely be more about the team effort on the bike so we’ll see how that affects us in the run leg, but it will be more about the time we can take out of that bike leg.”
Nicola, who has had much experience riding in a group in Olympic draft-legal racing, still found it a novel experience to ride with her pacemaker team. She stated, “We had the first real training today and it was really cool. It’s very nice to have a team. It’s a really nice feeling to just sit behind and have that speed without going flat out so I think that’s a new experience… We are still figuring out the last bits of the tactics and I think we will have different plans for race day just depending on how everyone is feeling and how the wind is. It’s coming together nicely.”
Follow our continued coverage leading into race day on our social channels on Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube as well as on sub7sub8.com.
