It’s never dull: –

Jill and myself travelled to Nottingham on the 26th May to meet Luke who had jetted in from Germany for the British Paratriathlon Championships. We had high hopes of clawing back another of the titles I won in 2010 and subsequently lost in 2011, buoyed by our recent success at the European Championships in Israel. However, with 4 other pairs in our category all gunning for the win and a place at the World Championships, we knew it wouldn’t be easy. There was Haseeb Ahmad who won last year’s event followed by a silver at the World’s in Beijing, Sean Grundy who won at the International invitation event in Hyde Park last summer who had set some impressive times at a talent ID day last November and former European Champ Chris Goodwin was also a surprise entry.

As most people will now be aware, we didn’t get the chance to compete for the win after crashing out at the beginning of the bike leg. This, unfortunately was as a result of colliding with a child who had  strayed onto the circuit on his bike. Being on the back of the tandem I didn’t really know what was happening at first. Luke started to shout at someone or something (we had been warned about ducks in the race briefing), then I heard a women’s voice and instantly thought ‘oh **** it’s a kid’. Next thing I remember is being thrown forwards at speed towards Luke and landing on the road. It was quite a collision as we would have been doing 25mph or more at that point, but there was nothing Luke could have done to prevent this as it all happened so quickly.

Thankfully we all seemed to come out of it with just minor injuries. but it could have been much worse…we thought we had seriously injured the kid given the speed of impact and weight of two people and the tandem. He was pretty lucky it seems and perhaps saved by his bike taking most of the force..

Unfortunately our lovely new Matrix tandem took the brunt of the impact with snapped forks, damaged front wheel and fractures in the carbon frame leaving us with a potential dilema for the rest of the season.

Whilst not wanting  to dwell on this incident too much, there are a  certainluy a few questions to be asked from an organisational point of view, especially as it was a national championships…

On the positive side, we had a pretty good swim coming in under 11 minutes and leading out of the water. We started the bike strongly and looked like we were in a good position.  Also Matrix have been exceptionally supportive following this incident and have agreed to replace the tandem and wheels – they truly are awesome sponsors!!

See Jill’s post on the Bosses’ Blog at: https://triteamdawson.co.uk/?p=802 or Luke’s blog at: for a different perspective on this.

 See Luke’s blog also at: http://lukewatson90.blogspot.co.uk/

Iain