I still have to pinch myself to realise what I've achieved," says Chrissie Wellington the day after. The day after she shifted the standards in the triathlon world. She is sitting in the small holiday flat in the Middle Franconian village of Pfaffenhofen, just a few kilometres from Roth. There she won the long-distance triathlon - 3.8 kilometres swimming, 180 kilometres cycling and 42 kilometres running - in an unofficial world record time of 8:31:59 hours. No woman has ever completed the classic long distance so quickly. And if someone now objects that there are many question marks about the comparability of such marks due to the conditions, nature and exact dimensions of the various competition courses, then one can only reply that Paula Newby-Fraser, who won the Ironman in Hawaii eight times, once completed the course in Roth in 8:50 hours - almost 20 minutes slower.
Now Christine Ann Wellington, the slim, muscular Brit, is the shooting star among the Ironwomen, who have astonished with a real explosion of performance in recent months. Last year, the Dutchwoman Yvonne Van Vlerken in Roth and the Hanoverian Sandra Wallenhorst at Ironman Austria fell short of Newby-Fraser's old record. Then there was Rebekah Keat's leap in performance: the Australian crossed the finish line in Roth after 8:39 hours - like Wellington, she was ahead of former professional cyclist Kai Hundertmarck.
Never tired, always in a good mood
What is the secret of this sudden success? "I'm lucky that I recover very quickly," says Wellington herself. The usually so hyper athlete with the nickname "Muppet" only seems to move a little slower the day after the big show. Better recovery means more training, more competitions. And so Wellington rushes from victory to victory throughout the year. She is unbeaten at the Ironman distance. "My body is okay, but my brain needs to rest," says the 32-year-old less than 24 hours after her record. As if to say: her body has moved faster, carried her over all the limits faster than her head could follow - as if her body is doing things that are not actually humanly possible.
Rarely has an athlete broken into the world class in her early 30s and without a long run-up - Wellington took part in her first triathlon at 27, turned professional at 30, won her first Ironman in Korea in the 2007 season and a few months later also won the sport's most important competition, the World Championship in Hawaii - hardly anyone had recognised her name before. In the previous year, she won Ironman competitions in Australia and Germany, the ITU World Endurance Championship (which competes with the Ironman series organised by the commercial event organiser WTC) and the Ironman Hawaii again in superior style. She even lost around ten minutes in Hawaii due to a flat tyre and problems with the compressed air cartridge. "She stayed calm until the last moment," said photographer Michael Rauschendorfer as an astonished eyewitness. While her lead over the competition melted away, Wellington smiled about the mishap: "For her it's fine, for others it's just a mask," says Rauschendorfer.
"Very tidy, very friendly," is how Kurt Denk, organiser of the Ironman Frankfurt, describes the athlete, although the money demanded by Wellington's management for the 2009 start was too high for him. She lets her manager Ben Mansford take care of unpleasant things.
"I want to show that sport is fun," says the world's best long-distance triathlete. She epitomises the good mood, the enthusiasm for sport that inspires many. While some competitors put earphones in their ears so that they can drift along the course to music, Wellington says: "I train with music. But in the race I want to hear the spectators, it gives me motivation. The crowd in Roth was fantastic, not even Hawaii can compete with that." She has internalised the triathlon lifestyle: finishing, testing your own limits; ambitious performance thinking paired with demonstrative togetherness - triathlon as a great community of suffering.
She doesn't like slipstreaming. The battle with herself and the elements, which culminates every year in mid-October in a showdown in the lava desert of Hawaii - that's her speciality. She is prepared to live for the sport 24 hours a day, seven days a week - "training, resting, eating, sleeping", that is her rhythm. Gone are the days when she jammed her hand in a London bus door after a night of drinking - all that remains of that is a memory and a scar. And when she took a six-week holiday last year after her triumph in Kona, she flew to Argentina and cycled through the Andes. Sport every day, that's her life. "Cycling is fantastic for exploring landscapes and cultures," says the Ironman world champion. The impression she gets is that she can't really rest.
Discovery in the Himalayas
But where does this woman come from? She is not a former world-class swimmer and has no successful past at the Olympic distance. Nevertheless, her debut as a marathon runner in 2002 was a brisk 3:08 hours. She is a late bloomer. At an age when world-class athletes usually work their way to the top through squads and training camps, Wellington travelled the world, studied and worked as an advisor in the British Ministry of the Environment. It was only during a sabbatical year as a development worker in Nepal in 2005, on a 1,400 kilometre mountain bike tour through the Himalayas, that she discovered what endurance talent lay dormant in her: she competed with Nepalese Sherpas. In autumn 2006, she won the age-group World Championships in the Olympic distance in Lausanne. The decision to earn money with the sport was made.
And then everything happened very quickly. So fast that the experts are puzzled: "Everything in triathlon is moving to a different level - I can no longer understand the development: Technically, not so much has developed. And nothing has changed in terms of training theory," says triathlon coach Katja Mayer, former Ironman winner with a best time of 9:20 hours. She believes that triathlon has a serious doping problem - not entirely new, but now particularly visible. But no one has any proof. However, the revelations in cycling have made people suspicious. On the other hand, the women's triathlon still had potential for development. Wellington's time is around 40 minutes faster than the men's record set by Belgian Luc Van Lierde in Roth in 1997.
"Women have a special capacity for suffering," says training scientist Markus De Marées from the Cologne Sports University. This means that on extreme endurance distances, women's performance is closer to that of men than on sprint distances. But: "Steep careers from nothing always have something disreputable about them," warns De Marées. But there are such careers: "Andreas Niedrig is certainly an extreme example - but it shows that you can still successfully enter competitive sport at an advanced age and make it to the top of the world," says De Marées, referring to the career of the former drug junkie, who later became one of the world's best triathletes. No expert wants to take note of top performances uncritically - even though Wellington was part of the "Iron Transparency" doping control programme at Ironman Germany in 2008. However, neither the organisers nor NADA will reveal who was tested and when.
It is also irritating for many that Chrissie Wellington was made fit for the world top by a man who does not have a good reputation: Brett Sutton is notorious on the scene: The Australian is regarded as a representative of a training system in which only the toughest survive the training sessions. His athletes, who usually compete more often than is generally considered healthy, always like to be where doping control officers find it particularly difficult to get to, according to rumours in the scene. In addition, the maligned coach has been banned from his profession in his home country of Australia for sexually abusing underage female athletes.
So it was probably not a bad thing for her career planning that Wellington parted ways with Sutton in 2008. She still has phrases like: "You have to trust me and let me decide what's best for you." Anyone who meets the self-confident, wiry Brit can easily imagine that this relationship didn't last long. Wellington doesn't come across as someone who likes to be patronised. In the meantime, she has worn out two other coaches, most recently the multiple short-distance world champion Simon Lessing. "I want to determine my own training programme," she comments on the separation.
She has now learnt how success in triathlon works. And is now going her own way. "I'm excited about how things will go in Kona," she says, looking ahead to the most important competition of the year. While it is difficult to predict the men's winner's finish on 10 October, it would come as no surprise if this energetic, always joking Englishwoman with her freckled face and curly hair were to win for the third time in a row and finally welcome the last finishers on Alii Drive with a dance at midnight - after 20 hours on her feet. It is quite possible that she will also beat Paula Newby-Fraser's best time, which has stood at 8:55:28 since 1992. Nevertheless, the woman would remain an enigma. Chrissie Wellington herself thinks so: "It's all a bit surreal."
TO THE PERSON:
Born18 February 1977 in Bury St. Edmunds (GBR)
Place of residenceBoulder/Colorado (USA)
Size1.73 metres
Weight: 60 Kilo
Triathlon since: 2004
Triathlon pro since: 2007
Important successesWorld Champion Age Group 2006; Ironman Korea, Alpe d'Huez Triathlon, Ironman Hawaii 2007; World Champion Long Distance, Ironman Australia, Ironman Europe, Alpe d'Huez Triathlon, Ironman Hawaii 2008; Ironman Australia, Challenge Roth 2009
Bike sponsorCannondale : Cannondale
Internet: www.chrissiewellington.org
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Andreas Kublik
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