20th Anniversary of Simon Whitfield’s historic gold medal

Simon Whitfield put Canada on the Olympic triathlon map with his historic run to gold in the sport’s debut at the 2000 Games in Sydney, Australia.

Whitfield was a relative unknown heading into the race, and even had to overcome a crash on the bike for the win. He was 24th off the bike, then worked his way to the field to finally outsprint Germany’s Stephan Vuckovic in dramatic style to take the win.

Here’s a gallery from the race courtesy of ITU Media:

[shareprints gallery_id=”68142″ gallery_type=”filmstrip” gallery_position=”pos_center” gallery_width=”width_100″ image_size=”small” image_padding=”0″ theme=”dark” image_hover=”false” lightbox_type=”slide” titles=”true” captions=”true” descriptions=”true” comments=”true” sharing=”true”]Whitfield’s splits were 18:18 for the 1,500 m swim, 59:12 for the 40 km bike and 30:54 for the 10 km run – his crossed the line in a total time of 1:48:24.

In 2008 he would take the silver medal at the Olympics in Beijing.

Here’s the video that was shown to commemorate Whitfield’s induction into the Canadian Hall of Fame last year.