Jan Frodeno’s fairy-tale ending may not have materialised in Nice, but the man regarded by many as the GOAT has written a story unmatched by anyone else over the last two decades. We sat down with the tri legend to look back at a career well executed…
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s Jan Frodeno mustered mind and body at altitude in Andorra, the former Olympic and three-time Ironman world champion understood both the weight of expectation and size of the challenge ahead. “We’ve never seen a world-class field come together on a course like this,” he said. “That will change the dynamics and there are certain athletes who are going to be very aggressive.”
If The Last Dance was the refrain in the build-up to his attempt to regain a treasured title last won in imperious style in Hawaii in 2019, by the time he landed in the south of France – with the artwork on his Canyon Speedmax inspired by the Saturn 5 rocket – it had been rebranded Mission Moonshot.
With hindsight there was merit in both titles. In triathlon, perhaps only Frodeno can draw parallels to basketball great Michael Jordan in terms of influence; Jordan’s Last Dance miniseries a smash-hit for Netflix. But Moonshot also signalled the cautionary note that triumph on Nice’s Promenade des Anglais was no given, and so it would prove.
At 42, Frodeno would have been four years older than Craig Alexander was when the Australian became the oldest men’s Ironman world champion in 2011. Instead, we saw 24-year-old Sam Laidlow crowned as the youngest-ever male winner.
Frodeno had also been struggling with a litany of injuries, which forced him out of Kona last October where his own course record was shattered by 11mins by Norway’s Gustav Iden – underlining just how much the standard had been raised.
In Nice, Frodeno knew he’d have to be better than ever on a course he wasn’t suited to, but as he gathered sponsors and media together in a pre-race get-together on the slopes of the Maritime Alps, he said he was in better shape than ever before: “The overall level and depth of competition has gone up, so it will require stepping up the game. I don’t necessarily look at the numbers, but I know that I’m capable of doing what I did in 2019 and more.”
Even if it wasn’t pre-race bravado, it became clear that only a seismic effort could have held off the insatiable Laidlow, and the father-of-two was all class and high-fives as he accepted his fate and embraced the warmth of the home crowd. Twenty-fourth plac
