08/05/2008 - Fraser Cartmell at Wildflower

A report by Phil Gray

Another great race for Total Racing Inc's Fraser Cartmell finishing 5th at Wildflower Half Ironman Triathlon:

Fraser put in a very solid swim to exit 2nd out of the water with a 43 second gap on McCormack . Out onto the bike and as you would expect the bike demons of Chris Lieto and Bjorn Anderson put down the hammer to open things up with the fastest splits of 2:14:00 and 2:14:27 respectively. Producing another fantastic bike split, Fraser exited T2 a couple of seconds up on McCormack almost 6 mins 18 down on the race leader Bjorn Anderson, 5 mins 38 down on Lieto and 55 secs down on Llanos. Out onto the run and as you would expect McCormack did what he did to take the Hawaii title and produced a fantastic run of 1:14:33 to take out the win. Llanos was a very close 2nd only 19 seconds down. Putting in a very solid run of 1:18:52 Fraser passed previous race leader Anderson and was only caught by McCoramck and Legh to give him 5th place, only 1.17 off a podium place.

To put this result into perspective you need to know the caliber of the athletes in the race. Chris McCormack (current World Ironman Champion, the best triathlete in the world today), Eneko Llanos (current Xterra World Champion, 7th at Hawaii 2007 and current Ironman Lanzarote champion), Chris Lieto (6th at Hawaii 2007), Chris Legh (previously 6th and 8th at Hawaii). This was a race full of the worlds best long distance triathletes.

Final results and splits: