What compels people to do a triathlon?
On an individual level, all sorts of reasons have been put forward over the years. The challenge is oft-cited, as is the variety offered in training. Once the option exists, there will almost always be someone willing to sign up.
On the wider front, though, the question remains. What is the driving force behind the collective organisation of triathlon?
Take running. There is a logic behind the birth of competitive running. Of the past few decades, ample weight has been given to the theory that running was a point of separation that enabled homo sapiens (us) to develop and thrive. Under this model, humans became endurance athletes, with benefits such as opening up new methods of hunting.
If humans were born to run, it follows that this natural exercise would eventually evolve into a competitive sport over the millennia.
Swimming and cycling equally have their parts to play in the story of human development.
Then there is triathlon. It does not have any of the same ties to history or culture that any of its consituent parts possess. After all, Pheidippides ran from the Battle of Marathon; he did not swim-bike-run back to Athens. Moreover, as an endurance sport, it is distinct from ball sports that typically entail greater participant interaction and feed into human sociability.
Yet triathlon has emerged and grown all the same.
One origin story put forward is of a basic argument as to which of the three components of the sport are harder: swimming, cycling or running. This debate is often picked up on in the lore of the American roots of triathlon, particularly with regards to Ironman racing.
The intrinsic challenge of triathlon also features in its American origin story. It coincided with the running boom of the 1970s in which running became widely popularised as a past-time. Members of the running community wanted to find a way to remain a cut above what they considered the ordinary participant and so conceived of triathlon.
The interplay of the challenge and the exclusivity of being able to complete said challenge retains its lustre today. For some athletes, running a 5km is not enough, only a triathlon will do. Likewise, a marathon is not the biggest obstacle to tackle when an Ironman exists.
This need for exclusivity also partly explains the emergence of the double-Ironman distance. There is little mainstream attention or glory to be had in it, but it creates its own sub-group of athletes that have completed it.
However, the challenge and exclusivity of triathlon do not fully explain the widespread entry of hundreds of thousands of athletes worldwide into the sport. Exclusivity services a select group of participants, not the masses, and few enter the sport set upon joining the most extreme end from the start.
What, then, compels people to take on the challenge of triathlon? There are plenty of other challenges in other sports to try. What is it about triathlon?
One answer may actually be that the challenge of the sport holds its greatest draw at times of socioeconomic difficulty. Simply put, when times are hard, people reach for a hard sport.
To look back through the history of triathlon is to see a series of spikes in participation that correlate with times of extreme hardship. There is not enough data to assert causality but there is certainly a pattern.
Rather than subscribing to the American story of the birth of triathlon, another option is to wind the clock back further. Instead, triathlon first appeared in a recognisable form in France in the 1920s and 1930s.
In this world, triathlon’s growth lines up with the post-First World War strife then the immense difficulties of the post-Great Depression period of the 1930s.
Life is never all bad but the interwar period was a time of widespread upheaval and uncertainty. A generation had been traumatised by war and then a pandemic before entering a decade of economic and geopolitical instability. In that context, people decided to innovate triathlon and push themselves in new ways.
The American pioneers of the sport in the 1970s said they were unaware of the French roots of the sport. With only three ingredients required, triathlon is a simple cake to make and it makes sense that it could have arisen independently in multiple locations.
One commonality binds the French and American stories, though.
The Mission Bay Triathlon of 1974 in San Diego is pointed to as the first official (or modern) triathlon. At the time, America was gripped in a time of historic difficulty.
The Watergate scandal had tarnished trust in the federal government while the OPEC crisis (which started in late 1973 in the wake of the Arab-Israeli War) plunged the global economy into its worst decline since the Great Depression.
To go with that, moments like the Ted Bundy murders and the Super Outbreak of tornadoes meant that 1974 was a time of deep crisis in America.
And that is when triathlon got off the ground in the country.
Later, in 1980, the first modern European triathlon would take place in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. Since the Soviet invasion of the country in 1968, Czechoslovakia had suffered significant repression and, like many other countries behind the Iron Curtain, endured plenty of hardship.
Is triathlon a tough sport for tough times? There has been a pattern if nothing else.
Of course, little is ever univariate and there are other factors behind triathlon’s emergence and rise. Finance is one of the most important items to note.
The success of the Hawaii Ironman as a commercial product prompted a desire to replicate it in Europe. The Nice Triathlon was subsequently launched in 1982.
At the same time, French television produced a show on the Nice Triathlon (Journey to the End of Suffering) to popularise it with a wider audience. The choice of word is interesting. At every point, suffering has been a core component of the sport.
Power and politicking can also be counted as notable driving forces in the sport. Although they did not help it start, once triathlon arrived on the scene the pursuit of power and control of the sport shaped its next steps.
The European Triathlon Union was founded in 1985 and was soon followed by the International Triathlon Union in 1989. To a large extent, the ITU was founded to stop triathlon being drawn under the auspices of Modern Pentathlon. Had Modern Pentathlon taken control of the sport, a pathway existed to put it into the Olympics prior to its eventual entry in 2000.
The power struggle of the late 1980s between the ITU and the International Modern Pentathlon Union has echoes of Austria and Prussia competing for leadership of a united Germany in the 19th century, albeit with infinitely less significance than the German question of the 1800s.
Either way, the ITU won its power struggle and managed to get triathlon into the 2000 Olympic Games.
From that point on, the sport was established. Yet it still needed to grow. The next major milestone in its growth can be seen with the 2008 announcement of the new World Triathlon Series.
Naturally power and money had a hand in introducing the WTS. The ITU was coming out of a lawsuit with Ironman and had a clear need to capitalise on the sport after its third Olympic Games appearance in Beijing. Meanwhile, the Olympics had proven the potential commercial value of the sport and a new structure was required to realise it.
At the same time, the socioeconomic trends behind the 2008 announcement add further colour to the picture.
The Global Financial Crisis of 2007 had left the world reeling and concomitant fallout aligned with a rise of interest in the sport. On balance, the 2008 shift is not quite as pronounced as the interwar years or 1970s, although there may be something to it.
Throughout it all, it must be emphasised again that the individual level will always ne important. Human actors have their own interests and take part in triathlon for their own reasons. In addition, correlation is not causation.
Nevertheless, the fact that triathlon made its greatest shifts in the toughest economic environments of the previous century indicate there may be something to people needing the pain of the sport.
It may sound counter-intuitive but there could be something to the psychology of taking control of and containing suffering in a race when so much difficulty and uncertainty swirls around public life.
The collective decision to take part in triathlon, then, is shaped by the world around us as much as think it is to do with our own choices. More often than not, we are the product of our environment.
To posit an answer the question of what has compelled people to take on triathlon in growing numbers for the past century, the answer may be simple.
It is a tough sport for tough times.
