Sam Laidlow nails Nice with huge Ironman World Championship win

He’s just 24 years old. Last year he was well ahead during the run at the Ironman World Championship and managed to hold off all but one athlete, taking second in his first trip to the Big Island. At the press conference this week, he noted that of all the men in the field, he had the fastest Kona time.

Little did we know that today Sam Laidlow would become the fastest man ever at the Ironman World Championship in Nice, too. While, in theory he should have arrived as a favourite, his uneven year of racing hardly indicated he was ready to become a world champion – he had a pair of wins at Challenge Gran Canaria and Challenge London to go along with a DNF at Ironman Lanzarote, an eighth at Challenge Roth and another DNF at the PTO Asian Open. Add to that the fact that he’s young, had never won an Ironman title (he finished second at Ironman UK two years ago after being run down by Joe Skipper and won the full-distance TradeInn event last year), and it seemed as though a win against this stacked field would be a long shot.

In the end Laidlow showed us all that it was anything but.

The British-born Frenchman has grown up with triathlon in his blood. As a child his parents moved to France to run a triathlon training centre, and Laidlow grew up dreaming of someday being a world champion. Earlier this week, at the press conference, Laidlow passed off a question about pressure by saying that someday he would become a world champion, so if it didn’t happen today, the day would provide more experience to help the inevitable championship happen.

Turns out he won’t need any more experience.

Lead-pack swim …

Laidlow started making his mark on the race right from the swim. While Braden Currie took things out in the nearly 25-degree water (wetsuits weren’t allowed), Laidlow blasted to the front after the first set of turns that brought the athletes back towards the beach in the double-rectangle course. Laidlow was flying along with the current, and remained at the front on the way back out, too.

Towards the end of the swim Jan Frodeno started to push the pace and would hit the rocky beach along with American Matthew Marquardt, who made it up the ramp first, and Currie, who also beat the German to the timing mat. Laidlow was seventh of the 11-man lead group.

Once on the bike it wasn’t long before Laidlow made his move. Once the 2,400 m of climbing began Laidlow and countryman Clement Mignon started to pull clear of the rest of the field. Mignon couldn’t match Laidlow’s pace, though, and by the halfway point of the ride Laidlow was clear, two minutes up on Mignon, three minutes ahead of super-biker Magnus Ditlev, who had trailed by 1:30 out of the water and managed to ride his way through much of the field. (Ditlev was still losing time to Laidlow, though.)

Rudy Von Berg, who had been part of the main pack, was in fourth at that point, a shade under four minutes down, with Currie at 4:12 and super-cyclist Cam Wurf at 5:07. After his great swim, Frodeno lost a water bottle early – who knows if that was enough to knock him off his game, but the three-time Kona champ found himself just under 10 minutes behind, with his countryman Patrick Lange one spot ahead after having made up the 1:15 deficit he’d had after the swim.

By the time the bike was over, Laidlow had increased his lead to 5:16 over Von Berg, 5:53 over Ditlev and 7:17 over Wurf. Some of the fastest runners in the field found themselves over 10 minutes back – France’s Leon Chevalier was just over 11 minutes behind, Mingnon had faded to sixth, 12:13 back with Lange in seventh at 12:29. (Weiss got a 5 minute penalty for littering – we’re trying to get more details, and came off the bike in a group with Lange.) Frodeno’s “moon shot” was apparently not going to launch, as he hit T2 13:02 behind.

 

No touching Laidlow

We were all expecting some super-fast run splits, and we got them as Lange blasted to a 2:32:41 run split along the super-hot Promenade des Anglais. That wasn’t enough to catch Laidlow (8:06:22), though, as the Frenchman’s 2:41:46 run split was enough to hold off the German (8:10:17) by a shade under four hours. Ditlev (8:112:43) would end up running a touch faster than Laidlow (2:41:07), which was enough to get him past Von Berg (who grew up in the French Riviera and finished in 8:12:57) to round out the podium.

The impressive French connection continued as Leon Chevalier would take fifth (8:15:07), Arthur Horseau finished sixth (8:18:36) and Clement Mignon rounded out the top 10 (8:24:10).

Stay tuned for more coverage from here in Nice!