There are many things to admire about the great Kristian Blummenfelt, a man who has played such a part in taking triathlon to new levels in recent years, and one of them is his brutal honesty.
The brilliant 30-year-old from Bergen has won pretty much every major prize the sport has to offer in the past three years – including that sensational Olympics gold medal in Tokyo in 2021.
Blummenfelt hoped to win another gold at Paris 2024 on July 31, but the dream died on the streets of the French capital when he came home a distant 12th as Alex Yee and Hayden Wilde fought out that incredible, heart-stopping battle for gold.
The Norwegian superstar knew he faced a mighty task when he began his Paris buildup in 2023, having spent the best part of two years racing over longer distances – claiming both the IRONMAN World Championship and the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in the process.
Blummenfelt on Paris 2024 bid
Blummenfelt was never able to regain the speed in his run legs to be able to fight the likes of Yee or Wilde over 10k at the end of an elite short-course race. But he does not blame that spell up at full distance for that. He instead looks squarely in the mirror, admits the ‘project’ was a failure, and puts forward a different reason.
He believes he was as far away from fighting for podiums in Paris, as he had been in Yokohama and Cagliari earlier in 2024.
Speaking in a video interview on his YouTube channel (watch the full version at the foot of this page), ‘Big Blu’ explained: “Did we fail the project? Yes we did, of course, when you come 12th in Paris you are failing the project of coming back to short-course. So that’s the harsh brutality.
“But I don’t think it’s the Ironman racing I did in 2022. It’s sort of more we have to be honest with ourselves, the decisions we did in training, how we were weighting it the last 12 months, that was not good enough. It was obviously good enough to be in Ironman shape, but I think it’s been tilted a bit in the wrong direction.”
‘Big Blu’ is now on to Kona
While Blummenfelt remains disappointed that his recent IRONMAN Frankfurt victory came “three weeks too late”, it does at least provide a positive for the remainder of his 2024 season – and the major goal of the IRONMAN World Championship in Kona.
He admitted he went to Germany with no idea or real hope that he could be competitive, a strange feeling, but instead he romped to a convincing victory in a time of 7:27:21.
“Standing there on the start line, with the mindset that I would just race the race as normal, as long as I had the energy for it, just expecting that after 3 or 4 or 5 hours I would just be smashed and have to survive the next 6 or 7 or 8 hours or whatever it would take me to finish the course.”
