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Puncture Wound: Wellington tells the story surrounding the flat tire heard 'round the world
By TJ Murphy/Triathlete Magazine
10/14/2008 |
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Chrissie Wellington’s second Ford Ironman World Championship goes into the record books with an asterisk. Her official time was 9:06:23, nearly 15 minutes in front of the next finisher, Yvonne Van Vlerken. The asterisk will reference the question: What would she have clocked on a day in Kona marked by wretched conditions if she hadn’t struggled with a flat tire?
While that question will never find a hard answer, rumors floating around the story of Wellington’s tire episode resonated throughout the island: That Wellington couldn’t get her tire off; that Wellington had two flats, not one; and the assumption that Wellington didn’t know how to fix a flat.
“It was a rear tire flat,” Wellington said the morning after the race, eager to clarify the facts. “I was riding clinchers. I had two tire levers, one spare tube and two C02 canisters.”
Wellington quickly dismissed the notion that she couldn’t get the tire off. “It came right off,” she said. “I took the tire off, checked it for glass—there was none—and changed the tube. The problem was that when I tried to use the cartridges I didn’t put enough pressure on them to flow the gas into the tube.” Instead, according to Wellington, the quick-inflation gas fizzed away into the atmosphere.
Wellington says tech support didn’t show up, and she told the growing cast of spectators surrounding her to not provide any help. When fellow competitor Rebeka Keat passed by, she donated two cartridges to Wellington, handing them to a spectator standing nearby.
“I told him, ‘Don’t help me; I have to inflate this myself,” Wellington said, adding that she applied the cartridge with more pressure and it inflated successfully. She resumed her ride toward Hawi, quickly erasing the deficit caused by the flat.
Did Wellington panic? “No,” she said brightly at the press conference Saturday night. “My only concern was that I knew I had to be careful not to push to hard to reclaim the lost time. I didn’t want to jeopardize my capacity to run well.”
Seems she judged it right: Wellington’s swift 2:57:45 clocking snapped the record for women’s Hawaii Ironman run split.
Article courtesy of Triathlete Magazine. |
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