This is the first race on this course. The „predicted“ times are therefore only based on the athletes previous results and do not take potential course conditions into account.

KPR points and Prize Money

IM Taiwan is a P-2000 race. It has a total prize purse of 25.000 US$.

Male Race Participants

Female Race Participants

Winning Odds

Male Race Participants

• Cameron Brown: 70% (1-1)
• Fredrik Croneborg: 18% (5-1)
• Domenico Passuello: 5% (20-1)
• Nick Baldwin: 3% (30-1)
• Patrick Evoe: 2% (41-1)

Female Race Participants

• Kim Schwabenbauer: 33% (2-1)
• Dede Griesbauer: 30% (2-1)
• Dimity-Lee Duke: 13% (6-1)
• Camilla Lindholm: 9% (10-1)
• Shiao-yu Li: 8% (12-1)
• Keiko Tanaka: 7% (13-1)

Conditions on Race Day

After the course changes in 2014, we’ve had very similar conditions this year: An adjustment of -15:21 compared to -15:12 this year indicates a very slow course, mainly because of a pretty hard bike. From what I’ve heard, the wind was again blowing from an Easterly direction making the bike harder. Maybe we’ll have a different direction next year, possibly making the course a bit faster.

Male Race Results

Fredrik Van Lierde put up a clinic: After a solid swim he posted a fast bike ride (more than 11 minutes quicker than the second fastest by his country man Bart Aeronauts), followed by a sub-2:50 marathon without any pressure on him. He won by almost 15 minutes in front of Ivan Rana who posted the fastest run. Bart Aernouts didn’t quite find his speedy run legs, but was able to secure his Kona slot finishing third. Matt Trautmann ran through the field to claim fourth place, while Eneko Llanos had to settle for fifth place.

Female Race Results

Finally, Jodie Swallow put together an all around solid race in her „home IM“: Her usual fast swim was followed by a controlled bike, still putting her in the lead in T2 but only by about two minutes. She then was able to post a good 3:10 marathon (about 9 minutes quicker than last year), extending the lead to more than eight minutes at one point. Speedy runners Lucy Gossage (3:06) and Susie Cheetham (3:03) managed to overtake the earlier chasers Camilla Pedersen and Diana Riesler. This allowed the British athletes to claim all spots on the podium!

Conditions on Race Day

In the past, weather troubles such as wind (shortened swim in 2013) or lots of rain (first edition in 2012) made the course a bit harder. This year the conditions seemed almost perfect: A calm swim (allowing Marko Albert to post a new course record by four seconds) and not too windy on the bike (allowing Nils Frommhold to post a new bike record by almost two minutes). If there was any „criticism“ of the weather, the run was into a headwind. Overall, the race was a little bit slower than last year (adjustments of 13:57 vs. 15:02), leading to a new course rating of 12:43.

Live Coverage

This was the first time that the new GPS trackers were used for the Pro athletes and a new „Ironfan“ web page was deployed by Ironman. Here are a few observations:

• There were some improvements: the leaderboard contained a couple of  new, helpful features such as the ability to sort. However, I do not understand why sorting by first name is useful (instead of by last name). Also, the leaderboard was only working off the timing mats, not the GPS data.
• The Ironfan page showed a map-based tracker, but I couldn’t make much sense of the data that was shown. It appeared that the position of the athletes on the map was some kind of prediction based on previous time checks and earlier performances. Not useful at all.
• There was a „secret“ website by the Quarq, the manufacturer of the unit. This site showed „live“ GPS data (athlete dots moving around on a map) and seemed to be working well. However, they did not have any leaderboard, resulting in the commentators focusing on the distance between athletes – not helpful at all, we need time differences! (It would require some work to extract this information from the GPS data, but shouldn’t be too difficult.)

Male Race Results

After a quick swim without too much separation, Nils Frommhold and Luke Bell moved away from a big group of chasers, building an 11-minute lead. The big chase group probably made the pacing decisions  easier for some athletes new to the distance (such as Brad Kahlefeldt or Callum Millward) – it would have been great to see the impact of a 20m drafting rule here. After T2, Luke dropped back, eventually finishing in 15th place with a disappointing 4:16 marathon. For a long time, Nils looked like he had the race in the bag, but he also faded after 30k. Eventually Jeff Symonds proved to be the fastest runner, winning by three minutes over Tim Berkel who pushed the pace until the finish line. Brad Kahlefeldt showed that he can also run well over the marathon distance, posting the second fastest marathon and finishing in third place.

Christian Kramer was the fastest German in fourth place, followed by Nils and another IM rookie, Callum Millward in sixth place.

Female Race Results

As for the men, there were two leaders on the female side as well: Caroline Steffen quickly caught up to the fastest swimmer, IM rookie Annabel Luxford. These two couldn’t build a big lead though, and Mel Hauschildt and Yvonne Van Vlerken followed them within four minutes onto the run course:

It wasn’t a big surprise that Mel would be the strongest runner of these four – she took the lead at about the half marathon mark. But she was struggling with blisters, stopped to apply Vaseline („that didn’t help at all“) and fought her way to the finish line to win in 8:52. Behind her, Caroline Steffen was feeling the effects of her food poisoning from two weeks ago and was slowing down. This allowed Yvonne Van Vlerken to overtake Caroline in the finish chute to take second place. Caroline stumbled over the finish line, was quickly taken to medical and couldn’t attend the podium ceremony.

Asa Lundstroem was solid all day and finished fourth, while Beth Gerdes continues her string of amazing improvements (first sub-5 bike and again fastest run) in fifth place. In sixth and seventh place rookie Annabel Luxford crossed the line with her good friend Mirinda Carfrae (who safely validated her Kona slot while not taking any risks after catching the flu earlier in race week).