Relay Team triathlon..how do they work?



J

Joel Markovitz

Guest
With dreams of spring and summer, friends and I have registered as a
relay team for the Chicago Tri. I've done the event on my own, but
never on a team? Where does the swimmer stop and the biker start, at
the transition area? same with the runner? My friends have never
done any Tri events, so I'm guiding them through this. And right now,
its the deaf leading the blind (no offence to the hearing or vision
impaired of course...:-D )

Thnks, JM
 
On 2/16/04 3:41 PM, in article
[email protected], "Joel Markovitz"
<[email protected]> wrote:

> With dreams of spring and summer, friends and I have registered as a relay team for the Chicago
> Tri. I've done the event on my own, but never on a team? Where does the swimmer stop and the biker
> start, at the transition area? same with the runner? My friends have never done any Tri events, so
> I'm guiding them through this. And right now, its the deaf leading the blind (no offence to the
> hearing or vision impaired of course...:-D )
>
> Thnks, JM

JM,

I can't speak for the Chicago event specifically, but most relays I've seen the swimmer (or biker)
is supposed to physically tag the next person in the transition area. This is easy since you usually
have to hand off a timing chip. Most of the time I've seen the biker simply wait at the bike rack,
ready to go, and the swimmer runs up and puts the timing chip on the biker's ankle. Same with the
bike to run trans.

John
 
That's entirely up to race management. The word relay appears exactly zero times in the USA
Triathlon rules.

Usually it's a tag and chip transfer at the bike rack (have the runner take it off the swimmer's
ankle and put it on the cyclist's ankle, then have the swimmer do the transfer at T2, if that 3rd
person can be there at the tag)... some races, like St. Anthony's Tri in St. Petersburg, they put 2
coral's just outside transition, one on each end... the swimmer hands off the chip to the cyclist,
then the cyclist transitions (no shoes or helmet allowed in the tag area), rides, transitions again,
then hands off the chip to the runner in the second corral (again, the helmet and bike shoes stay in
transition)... a clever way to equalize the transition times between the relays and the triathletes,
of course they're not competing against each other for awards, so it really doesn't matter, but the
bottom line is that the handoffs are however race management wants them to be, and there's a pretty
good chance the red shirts (USAT officials) won't know what that is when you ask them.

Also, if you're not the cyclist, have the cyclist check out "how not to get a penalty" aka the
drafting rules summary: www.johnmeyer.net/EN/USAT/message.html

________________________________________________________________________
John Meyer, USA Triathlon category 2 official, Florida region <tri (at) johnmeyer .net>

"Joel Markovitz" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> With dreams of spring and summer, friends and I have registered as a relay team for the Chicago
> Tri. I've done the event on my own, but never on a team? Where does the swimmer stop and the biker
> start, at the transition area? same with the runner? My friends have never done any Tri events, so
> I'm guiding them through this. And right now, its the deaf leading the blind (no offence to the
> hearing or vision impaired of course...:-D )
 

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