At the 2024 Ironman World Championship Kona last weekend, two of the 54 professional guys who started did not finish. Learn about the experiences of DNF athletes like Trevor Foley, Gustav Iden, and others, from bike collisions to jellyfish.
The curse of Madame Pele, the goddess of fire and volcano, is a common warning to triathletes travelling to Hawaii’s Big Island to compete in the Ironman World Championship. Some claim that Pele is attempting to deter athletes along the Queen K when they are faced with unfavourable weather conditions.
If so, Pele was undoubtedly busy this year, causing chaos for the 54 professional triathletes who entered the Kona 2024 men’s-only event; 12 of them are listed in the results as DNF, meaning they did not finish. In contrast, only three out of forty-nine competitors DNFed in the Kona women’s race previous year.
However, it would be premature to place the blame on Madame Pele. The wind and bad weather weren’t the only factors that made the day on the course terrible. At least fifteen more men, including Kristian Blummenfelt and Sam Laidlow, were just making it to the conclusion.
Run times were noticeably slow overall after setting records on the bike, which may indicate that the pain was self-inflicted. Many professional athletes blew up the run after going overboard on the bike. Magnus Ditlev told Triathlete that he thought about stopping in T2 for that very reason (in his own words, “I think we all ruined each other’s races [on the bike].”).
However, there were other uncontrollable circumstances as well, especially for the 12 men who dared to face the island before failing. Here are the tales of the DNFs in the professional field at this year’s men’s Ironman World Championship event in Kona, which included everything from bike crashes to jellyfish to just plain bad luck.
DNFs at Kona 2024
Arthur Horseau
Reinaldo Colucci
Matt Burton
Gustav Iden
Dennis Chevrot
Trevor Foley
Clement Mignon
Pieter Heemeryck
Leonard Arnold
Arnaud Guilloux
Chris Leiferman
Robert Wilkowiecki
