Moving Forward

The Future of Triathlon by Daniel Cassidy

By InnerVoice

June 15^th, 2018

InnerVoice believes in the innovators, the dreamers and the optimists who are invested in improving endurance sports around the world. In our Moving Forward series you’ll hear first-hand accounts of how these thought-leaders are blazing trails across the industry.

Today, we hear from Major League Triathlon’s CEO and Founder, Daniel Cassidy.

it's A boring sport

The entire race is only an hour and 15 minutes in duration, and in that time you get a front row seat to some of the world’s best athletes pushing their bodies to the absolute limit. We’ve built Major League Triathlon for fan experience because, as a fan myself, I wanted to make triathlon exciting to watch and enticing to be a part of.

I raced as an amateur for about 8 years, and my wife had been to every single race I’d ever done - from Sprint distance all the way up to Half-Ironman. After about 7 years, she said to me “I love how much you enjoy the sport, but I can’t keep coming to this. It’s mentally draining and physically exhausting to stand around for 5 hours and maybe see you actually race for 15 seconds.”

She was right. It’s such a boring sport, and I love it so much that I don’t want people to be bored while they watch it. We began wondering why they don’t make it more fun for spectators. Why isn’t there live music or beer gardens or activities for kids? As we started to think about a remedy and began to research, we realized a couple of things: there’s no massive sports property built around amateur athletes, so we needed to create something around the pros; and there’s not much point competing with Ironman and the ITU.

I could do that

I’d never seen Mixed Team Relay in-person before, I’d only watched videos, but I immediately fell in love with it. Firstly, Americans love teams, so there was an opportunity to draw on civic pride and have fans root for their home team. It’s also mixed-gender which is something that just doesn’t exist in pro sports. And it’s fast!

With a 300-metre swim, 6km bike and 1.5km run, our distances are so short that you can stand in one spot and see almost the entire race. Plus, we can come to the fans rather than asking them to come to us. For instance, we have plopped a race down on the Atlantic City boardwalk in the middle of summer - people are going there already, and they’re looking for exciting things while they’re there. And we know once people see our races they’re going to be captivated.

I firmly believe that the key to growing amateur participation is having a strong professional platform to market the sport to people. There are so many barriers to entry, but when someone on the street hears how short our distances are, they all say “I could do that.” They’re right, they could.

Triathlon: "I have to watch this"

I’m also a big believer in having heroes within the sport, and it’s something that mirrors my personal story. I grew up in Connecticut, but Chipper Jones tossed me a baseball at my first ever baseball game, and it made me an instant fan of his, and the Atlanta Braves. We have the opportunity to start that same type of lifelong love affair with triathlon by having kids watch Ben Kanute woosh by them on the bike, and then be able to go and talk to him afterwards about his experience at the Olympics.

The goal, ultimately, is to be the number 1 development league for Mixed Team Relay. This year we already have the top American, Canadian, Mexican and Australian athletes on our roster, with interest from many more international federations. We want to grow the amount of races and the amount of teams, and have people tune in to the television and online broadcasts. Slowly, we’ll turn the mindset from ‘triathlon: why would I watch that?’ to ‘triathlon: I have to watch this!