Blue 70.3?
Read something today that didn't make a lot of sense to me: The half-ironman is having it's name changed to Ironman 70.3
Doing the math, I found that I had correctly assumed that this silly name had come from the distance (in miles) for a half ironman. Readers of Fred Sommer's blog had some alternate ideas on where 70.3 could have come from:
"The average water temperature at an Ironman race"
"WTC's net worth in millions"
"The IQ of the marketing genius that came up with the 70.3 name"
"The number of people out of 1,000 surveyed that may embrace the name"
For anyone who was wondering (as I was) WTC stands for World Triathlon Corporation, who are the fine folks who own the "Ironman" label. It seems that WTC hasn't always had the best relations with the International Triathlon Union (ITU) and ITU runs a bunch of half iron races. So maybe this whole Ironman 70.3 is a way of saying, hey, WTC owns this race. (Ironman is no longer a race distance, it's a brand!)
Speaking of name changes, Ironman wetsuits have also just changed their name... to Blue Seventy. This time we're told that it's because 70% of the earth's surface is covered by water, yada, yada, yada... Could it be that it just became too expensive to license WTC's Ironman brand? Good thing water doesn't cover 70.3 percent of the earth's surface...
What is this sport coming to?
What I would love is to have any boy in the world who thinks of pirates to think of…Disney pirates.
~ Robert Iger, president, The Walt Disney Company
Doing the math, I found that I had correctly assumed that this silly name had come from the distance (in miles) for a half ironman. Readers of Fred Sommer's blog had some alternate ideas on where 70.3 could have come from:
"The average water temperature at an Ironman race"
"WTC's net worth in millions"
"The IQ of the marketing genius that came up with the 70.3 name"
"The number of people out of 1,000 surveyed that may embrace the name"
For anyone who was wondering (as I was) WTC stands for World Triathlon Corporation, who are the fine folks who own the "Ironman" label. It seems that WTC hasn't always had the best relations with the International Triathlon Union (ITU) and ITU runs a bunch of half iron races. So maybe this whole Ironman 70.3 is a way of saying, hey, WTC owns this race. (Ironman is no longer a race distance, it's a brand!)
Speaking of name changes, Ironman wetsuits have also just changed their name... to Blue Seventy. This time we're told that it's because 70% of the earth's surface is covered by water, yada, yada, yada... Could it be that it just became too expensive to license WTC's Ironman brand? Good thing water doesn't cover 70.3 percent of the earth's surface...
What is this sport coming to?
What I would love is to have any boy in the world who thinks of pirates to think of…Disney pirates.
~ Robert Iger, president, The Walt Disney Company
posted by Jonathan at 10:15 PM
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