SLT Stat Crunch: Luis Seals His Win In The Water

Vincent Luis’ amazing kick up Malta Mount to finally break the resistance of Kristian Blummenfelt captured the imagination of the triathlon world, but it was actually his swim that did the real damage.

That’s the view of Super League’s data analyst Graeme Acheson, who has been busy crunching the numbers following the last Championship Series race of this year.

While the swim of Luis is fast and consistent it often goes under the radar.

However, Acheson is adamant that the data he has collected from the men’s final in Malta proves that Luis’ magnificent swim forced his closest rivals to bike so hard that he blew their legs before even getting to the run.

Here are Graeme’s data driven takes:

The second swim had Luis, Wilde, Blummenfelt, Van Riel and Iden enter the water within a few seconds of each other. Luis completed that swim in 3:27. Van Riel was next fastest in 3:32, but the main rivals, Blummenfelt and Wilde swam 3:36 and 3:44 respectively, 9 and 17 seconds slower respectively.

They both (but Wilde especially) then had to put in a monstrous effort on the bike to catch Luis, who potentially took it easy. Luis rode a 7:03, with Wilde and Blummenfelt riding 6:48 and 6:51 respectively.

This potentially rode the legs out of them and allowed Luis to, literally, run away with it on the final run, but it was all made from that swim at the start of the second triathlon of the Swim-Bike-Run, Swim-Bike-Run sequence that they had to complete in this format.