RICHARD ALLEN overcame a nasty experience with dead fish and snails to win Europe’s largest triathlon yesterday. Allen outsprinted Marc Jenkins to take the London Triathlon men’s elite championship in succession to the absent Simon Lessing, winner of all six titles since the inauguration of the event in 1997.
Yet Allen almost missed London after a three-week sickness brought on, it is believed, by poor swim water quality at a World Cup race in Edmonton, Canada, last month. “I was really ill for a couple of days, then it cleared up and came back,” Allen said. “I did not enter this race until the last minute.”
So last minute that Allen was omitted from the Scotland team for the Home Nations international, held in conjunction. “I was not sure how I was going to be,” he said, having finished only sixteenth in a World Cup race in Salford the Sunday before. “The water in the lake there (Edmonton) was not very healthy. There were dead fish and snails in it.”
No such problems for London. Royal Victoria Dock, where the swim was held, was passed clean by the Royal Docks Management Association and a record 5,500 competitors took part in various race categories over two days.
Allen, 29, took the main men’s title for the first time, having finished runner-up twice. His victory helped to vindicate his decision to give up his £20,000-a-year national lottery funding.
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Towards the end of last year Allen took himself off the World Class Performance programme because he felt that he needed full control over his race planning. “It is a fantastic system, but, like all systems, there are some people for whom it does not work,” Ryan Bowd, Allen’s manager, said.
For Jodie Swallow, winner of the London women’s elite race, victory confirmed her re-emergence after injury. No sooner had she overcome Achilles tendon trouble than she suffered a stress fracture in her left leg in January this year. Yesterday she stormed away on the run to win by almost two minutes from Catriona Morrison after Leanda Cave, the world champion, dropped out injured at the end of the ride.
Lessing abandoned London this year to be in Minneapolis, where the biggest purse in the sport was at stake on Saturday. The first prize of $250,000 (about £150,000) went to Barb Lindquist, of the US, after a handicap race in which the women went off nine minutes before the men. Lindquist beat Simon Whitfield, the Olympic champion from Canada, with Lessing fourth.