Manufactured Heroes
I'm very excited.
Any sport is more interesting if you know the players. As you get to know a little something about the personalities involved, you can start to cheer your favorites and maybe even boo those you don't like. Television does a great job helping you with this during the Olympics: it creates heroes (Bode Miller) and villians (Bode Miller). For the past couple months, I've wanted to start to get to know something about the big players in the world of triathlon.
Our Tri Team is having a preview screening of a new triathlon documentary, "What It Takes". One of the athletes featured in the movie is 3 Time Ironman World Champion Peter Reid, and he will be joining us at the screening. I just finished watching him on the amazing 2003 Ironman World Championship DVD. (There's a 5-minute preview on YouTube. You HAVE to watch it: Ironman 2003) One of the biggest names in the sport is coming to MY tri team? How great is that!
If he's cool, then I'll have someone to root for the next time he enters a big race. If he's a jerk, then I can cheer the competition. The important thing is that now I will have some personal connection to future championship races. And one great thing about the sport of triathlon: amateurs compete in the exact same races as pros. So some day we could be racing together, him shooting for 1st place and me going for 1001st! Suhweet!
All things being equal, I think I'd rather have Tim DeBoom visit us. Not because he's a better athlete (or not), but simply because it's fun saying his name. Tim DeBoom.
posted by Wedgie @ 12:10 AM
6 Comments:
What's cool is that we not only all race together, but my (limited) experience has been that elite endurance athletes are right there with suggestions on how others might improve. Sort of like if a football team said, "Hey, here's how we do things, and by the way, here's our playbook."
Ooh! I want to see it. Is it going to be released nationwide?
It sounds like they hope the film will make ot to some festivals, and then there will be limited screenings throughout the country. You will almost certainly be able to get it on DVD at some point.
Peter Reid retired as of June 19th. Story should be in the next Triathlete magazine
Peter the Great retires from triathlon
However the documentary should be great to watch
I saw a message of his retiring on another website, but when I saw his race schedule for Tri Dubai I just assumed it was a bad rumor. I guess I now know why he has time to watch a movie with us. :(
He's a 3-time world champion and I am still excited to see him. And just because he's "retired" doesn't mean he'll never race again: he might be so impressed with how cool our tri-team is that he'll want to join us on our sprint races!
One thing's for sure. He won't ramble on about his skirt company.
-Tim
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