Jill.
She shakes her head.
She’s not going to think about Jill right now.
6.1.6: Tanami
By the time Jillian steps out of the water, Sunshine is already more than four miles away.
Although she gets a warm reception, the crowd is noticeably less enthusiastic than they had been for Sunshine, which might be due to the fact that they’ve already cheered more than two hundred swimmers through the transition area.
She wastes several nerve-wracking seconds trying to locate her locker. Unlike the rest of the triathletes, she has not set foot in the building before this very moment. Jago told her where her locker was, but now she can’t remember.
She’s instantly frantic. “Where is it?” she screams, banging on a nearby locker in frustration. No one responds. Her competitors are too busy to care, and the few race officials standing around are not permitted to offer her any assistance. “It’s not fair!” she yells, pounding another locker as she runs down the narrow aisles.
Finally, she spots her name scrawled on a piece of tape. She yanks the locker door open. Without removing her swimsuit, she slips into the shorts and the T-shirt waiting inside.
Then her shoes, without socks.
Then her helmet.
Then she’s out the door.
Then she’s on her bike.
Then she’s gone.
6.1.7: Tanami
“…well, Dave, as you know, we’ve had a bunch of dropouts already. You remember that seven women had to be pulled from the water. If you ask me, those women should never have been in the race in the first place. And we’ve lost at least a dozen more on the bike leg. Plus there’s about, I don’t know, thirty or thirty-five more who are lagging so far behind that I don’t even know why they bothered to start at all. I mean, I’m all for people setting new goals for themselves and all that, but I don’t think that the Olympics is the right place to take up a new event for the first time, which looks to me like what some of the women are doing out there today.”
“But most of the women are doing rather well…”
“That’s true, Dave. In fact, some of the times are extraordinary. But that’s mostly due to all the drafting that’s going on. As I explained earlier, drafting in the bike leg of triathlons has been against the rules for as long as I can remember. But for some reason, they’re allowing it here in the Olympics. And it’s changed the nature of the race. Instead of the bicycle leg being an individual effort, it’s become a team effort. I don’t like it.”
“Cindi, why don’t you explain to our viewers just exactly what it is about drafting that makes you feel that way?”
“Well, sure, Dave. I think that all you have to do is just look at what’s been going on. What you have out there are groups where each person takes a turn leading the pack and the rest of them draft off her. By drafting, the people in the pack go much faster in relation to the amount of effort they’re expending. Not only that, the women who draft the most won’t be as tired when they start the run leg. I really can’t go into that much detail about drafting because I’ve never done it. It’s always been illegal in triathlons. They draft all the time in bicycle racing, but that’s a team sport, and the triathlon is supposed to be an individual sport. It’s really not fair to some of the women out there.”
“But playing devil’s advocate here for a minute, I might say that since all of the women are allowed to draft, then none of them has any real advantage or disadvantage, right?”
“But you’re forgetting that some of them are much better organized at it than others. Look at the Russians, for example. About twenty miles into the bike leg, Arena Mosbek caught up to the other two Russian women, Marta Konuszenka and Olga Patrushkin. They got way ahead of Mosbek on the swim, but she caught up to them pretty fast on the bike. Remember, she happens to be a world-class cyclist. And frankly, Konuszenka and Patrushkin both looked pretty shaky on the bike. I got the feeling that neither of them have a whole lot of cycling experience. So once she caught up to them, they just fell in behind her, and she’s been leading the way for them ever since. Like an icebreaker leading a pair of rowboats through the ice, you might say. And as a result, they’re making much better time than they ever would have been able to do by themselves.”
“But since Mosbek’s not drafting on anybody, won’t she be exhausted by the end of the bike leg?”
“Sure she will be. I think that’s part of the plan. She’s sacrificing herself for her teammates. My guess is that she’ll drop out when she finishes the bike leg. The way she’s knocking herself out on the bike, there’s no way she can be effective on the run. But the other two will be as fresh as daisies.”
“So you’re accusing the Russians of…”
“I’m not accusing the Russians of anything, Dave. They’re playing by the rules. It’s the rules that stink. We’ve been racing under one set of rules for decades, and it’s tough to adjust to a new situation in the middle of the game. But what’s probably most unfair is that there are a couple of women out there who simply aren’t in a position to draft off anyone else…”
֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍
One of those women, Sunshine O’Malley, is in no position to draft simply because there has not been anyone in front of her at any time during the entire race.
When Sunshine rolled out of the swim-to-bike transition area, she led the race by two-and-a-half minutes. Now, with more than half of the bicycle leg behind her, her lead has grown to nearly fifteen minutes. Her eyes stare straight ahead with a burning intensity. Her compact body is bent forward in an aerodynamic crouch. Her powerful legs pump furiously, like pistons. Mile after solitary mile, she stretches her lead, hurtling over the freshly paved streets with grim determination.
֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍ ֍
Jillian Kendal also finds herself unable to take advantage of the change in the drafting rule, but for a very different reason.
Emerging from the water in 198th place, she discovers that her main problem is ridding herself of women trying to draft on her. Something about letting another cyclist hitch a free ride on her airstream grates on her, so she adopts the tactic of slipping into a pack of drafters, picking her way through to second or third position, maintaining her place just long enough to lull the other riders into a sense of complacency, then whipping past the leaders with a furious charge that catches the other cyclists by surprise.
And so, in two hours of jumping her way from pack to pack, Jillian Kendal has hop-scotched her way up from 198th place all the way up to 72nd.
6.1.8: Tanami
She glides into the transition area, her thick red hair matted in unseemly clumps that cling to her neck and back. The crowd here, larger than the one in the swim-to-bike transition area, begins the familiar chant: “Sunshine, Sunshine, Sunshine…”
She idly wonders how it is that this crowd has picked up the same chant as the crowd in the first transition area. Perhaps they’re the same people – after all, they’ve had more than four hours to relocate from one transition area to the other. Or maybe they were still at home when she transitioned from swim to bike and they heard the chant on radio or saw it on TV. Or maybe they’ve been keeping up with events on their phones. Or maybe it’s all just a coincidence, they’re two different groups of people who have latched on to the same method of voicing their support.
The entrance to this transition area slopes downhill, as Sunshine remembers from an earlier reconnoiter. She twists her right foot free of the pedal lock and swings it over the frame, stands on the left pedal for a few seconds, and then hops off the bike just before the front wheel crosses the dismount line. By the time she rolls the bike into the rack, she’s already unstrapped her helmet and flung it to the ground. Sitting down on a towel, she pulls off her bike shoes, slides her feet into her running shoes, and fastens the lace locks.
The changing room is in a small building about twenty yards away. She considers the idea of stepping in to change into a fres
h shirt. She even toys with the possibility of peeling off her soaked shirt, in public, in full view of the TV cameras, and slipping on a new one. She tosses the ideas around in her head for only a few seconds before she rejects them. Even as recently as a few days ago, the idea of disrobing in public would not have bothered her. But now she feels vulnerable, insecure. And she doesn’t want to take the time to run into the changing room. Every second counts. The other triathletes are hot on her heels.
And she must win. She must get that scholarship.
She must prove that she can do it.
She has to prove it to everybody.
And most of all, she has to prove it to herself.
6.1.9: Tanami
By the time that Jillian rolls into the transition area, Sunshine is already a couple of miles down the road.
“Who’s leading?” Jillian screams, as she rolls in.
“Sunshine,” comes the answer. And for a few seconds, the chant begins again – “Sunshine, Sunshine…” – as if the redhead herself had just appeared for a reprise.
“How far?” Jillian shouts, even as she desperately searches for her slot in the bike rack. “How many minutes?” Jago said it was near the fence, didn’t he? Which fence, goddamn it? There’s two goddamn fences, and they’re on opposite sides of the goddamn transition area…
The answers that come back to her vary in time from ten to twenty minutes. Splitting the difference, Jillian guesses that Sunshine has about a fifteen-minute lead. I can catch her, she thinks. That’s no problem.
I can run her down.
Some of the women she passed in the last mile are rolling in, and she narrowly avoids running into one of them. They know exactly where they’re going, she thinks, bitterly. At this rate, they may be out of the transition area before I even figure out what I’m supposed to be doing, and then I’ll have to pass them all over again.
For an instant, she has the disconcerting thought that Leida Andersen has messed with her again, she switched the numbers on the slots, or maybe she even moved the racks around. “Bitch,” she murmurs. Then, with a jolt, she remembers that Leida is in no position to give her a hard time, ever again.
Over there, that’s her slot, right where it’s supposed to be. She wheels her bike into the rack, throws off her helmet, kicks off her shoes. She opens her bright yellow Falconi RaceSack, sprays a shot of powder on her feet, slips on a pair of socks and then her running shoes. She’s still wearing her swimsuit under her clothes. Grabbing a T-shirt, she begins to jog out of the transition area. As she runs, she strips off her shirt, soaked with sweat, and slips into a fresh one.
Jago Danziger catches her eye as she exits the transition area. His face is creased with worry. He holds up all ten fingers, balls them into fists again, opens them again, and shrugs: There are about twenty women ahead of her. “Run them down!” he shouts over the crowd. But his voice lacks conviction, and this makes her angry. He doesn’t think I can do it, she thinks. The bastard. I’ll show him.
She runs at half speed for a minute, waiting to get her running legs, biding her time… And there it is, the magic moment. Exhilaration pulses through her body, down to her toes, out to her fingertips. Suddenly she’s not really running, she’s flowing. She’s eating up the road, devouring it, hungrily, greedily.
I’m the best, she reminds herself, as the tingle of runner’s euphoria soaks into every cell in her body. Nobody can beat me. Not Carolyn Kwan, not the Kiergaard twins, not the goddamn Russians. Not Sunshine O’Malley and her whole goddamn family.
I’m the best.
Before she covers even one of the twenty-six-point-two miles that remain to be run, she overtakes all four of the women who passed her in the transition area, and two new ones as well.
Nobody can beat me, she reminds herself, each time she motors by another runner.
I’m the best.
And don’t you forget it.
6.1.10: Tanami
Jillian doesn’t even realize that she’s passing Carolyn Kwan until she’s running right next to her.
Since she jogged out of the transition area, she’s zoomed past one runner after another, picking them off one at a time, not slowing down to exchange pleasantries, just -ZIP- and she leaves them in her dust. But she’s not getting as much satisfaction from it as she usually would. In fact, she’s barely noticing it at all. She’s not chasing these nameless runners. She’s chasing Sunshine O’Malley. She’s chasing a gold medal. Anything else, anybody else, is insignificant.
But she happens to look to her left as she’s passing perhaps the fifteenth runner and she notices that it’s Carolyn. It surprises her that she hadn’t recognized Carolyn, even from the rear. I suppose, she thinks, that I was just so intent on running that I wasn’t paying attention to anything else.
Which is, of course, exactly the way it should be.
Carolyn, staring straight ahead, doesn’t acknowledge Jillian’s presence. Normally, Jillian would take a few seconds to say hello, perhaps slip in a few digs. Normally, that would be fun. But that seems unimportant now, a waste of time and energy. So she just glides on by, picking up speed effortlessly, shifting into a gear that Carolyn simply does not have.
She whizzes past a few more runners, and then she catches a glimpse of the Kiergaard twins just as they round a curve at the crest of a hill. Let’s see, she thinks, there should be another aid station in about half a mile. If I time it right, I can slip in behind them, and then I can zip past them when they slow down for water. It’ll be fun to see their expressions.
But suddenly she doesn’t care about the Kiergaard twins. She doesn’t care whether surprising them would be fun or not. Passing up an aid station, any aid station, would not be a good idea. It’s getting hot, and there’s a long way to go. Today is not a day to play games. Today is different.
And so she maintains her pace, which means that she passes the twins well before the aid station. And when she slows down ever-so-slightly to grab at a cup of water – she misses the first cup, and she has to slow down just a bit more to make sure that she doesn’t miss the next one – the twins accelerate and zip past her.
“How many ahead of me?” Jillian asks, as she snatches at the water cup.
“Three,” someone yells after her as she gulps down the cool liquid. “Three, not counting those two.”
Three. That would be Sunshine – if she hasn’t quit yet. And who else?
She mentally ticks off the competition as she chases down the twins, but she quickly realizes that she hasn’t been paying enough attention to the faces she’s passed to figure out which ones remain. But just as she catches up to the twins again and prepares to shift into passing gear, she realizes that she hasn’t seen the Russian women. In fact, she hasn’t laid eyes on them since that awful moment in the square.
Are they even in the race? she wonders. I don’t remember seeing them in the starting area. Karl’s injury must have shaken them up. Did they go back to Russia? Or are they somewhere up ahead of me?
Well, there’s no sense in worrying about it, she thinks, as she ratchets up her blistering tempo yet another notch. I’ll find out soon enough.
6.1.11: Tanami
“And now that Sunshine’s passed the fifteen-mile mark, Cindi, I don’t know how anyone’s going to be able to catch her. What do you think?”
“Well, Dave, during the last commercial I spent some time with Larry Eubanks, our statistician, and we’ve come up with some interesting numbers. Larry, can you throw that first graphic up on the screen? Okay, good, thanks. Now, this chart lists the times that Sunshine O’Malley’s been churning out for each mile of the run leg. As you see, we’ve listed the times for mile one through mile fifteen, and we’ve averaged them out at the bottom.”
O’MALLEY
1
6:34
2
6:21
3
6:17
4
6:09
5
6:15
6
>
6:08
7
5:56
8
5:57
9
6:01
10
6:04
11
6:00
12
5:58
13
6:09
14
6:16
15
6:21
AVERAGE
6:10
“Okay, this shows us a couple of interesting things. First of all, her average time – six minutes and ten seconds per mile – is outstanding. Until a few years ago, it would have been good enough to blow any triathlete right off the course, man or woman.”
“Cindi, looking at these numbers – and I’m seeing them for the first time, just like you folks at home – but looking at these numbers… well, it looks like she started out slower – look at her first few miles: six thirty-four, six twenty-one – and then she really started to ramp it up…”
“I don’t know that I’d attach a whole lot of significance to that, Dave. It can be difficult to get… well, to get the feel of the road right after you get off the bike. Don’t forget that she biked a hundred and twelve miles before the run. That can be a difficult transition to make. But you can see that she started to settle into a pretty steady pace by mile four. In fact, from mile six through mile thirteen, all of her miles are below six-ten, which is her average through mile fifteen. But now look at what happens at mile fourteen.”
“She’s slowing down.”
“That’s right, Dave. I mean, her times are still very good – six-sixteen, six-twenty-one – but it’s the general trend that doesn’t look good for her. She was running so steadily for so long, but now she’s slowing down.”
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