Question:With dreams of spring and summer, friends and I have registered as a
relay team for the Chicago Tri. I've done the event on my own, but
never on a team? Where does the swimmer stop and the biker start, at
the transition area? same with the runner? My friends have never
done any Tri events, so I'm guiding them through this. And right now,
its the deaf leading the blind (no offence to the hearing or vision
impaired of course...:-D )
Answer:
I can't speak for the Chicago event specifically, but most relays I've seen
the swimmer (or biker) is supposed to physically tag the next person in the
transition area. This is easy since you usually have to hand off a timing
chip. Most of the time I've seen the biker simply wait at the bike rack,
ready to go, and the swimmer runs up and puts the timing chip on the biker's
ankle. Same with the bike to run trans.
That's entirely up to race management. The word relay appears exactly zero
times in the USA Triathlon rules.
Usually it's a tag and chip transfer at the bike rack (have the runner take
it off the swimmer's ankle and put it on the cyclist's ankle, then have the
swimmer do the transfer at T2, if that 3rd person can be there at the
tag)... some races, like St. Anthony's Tri in St. Petersburg, they put 2
coral's just outside transition, one on each end... the swimmer hands off
the chip to the cyclist, then the cyclist transitions (no shoes or helmet
allowed in the tag area), rides, transitions again, then hands off the chip
to the runner in the second corral (again, the helmet and bike shoes stay in
transition)... a clever way to equalize the transition times between the
relays and the triathletes, of course they're not competing against each
other for awards, so it really doesn't matter, but the bottom line is that
the handoffs are however race management wants them to be, and there's a
pretty good chance the red shirts (USAT officials) won't know what that is
when you ask them.
Also, if you're not the cyclist, have the cyclist check out "how not to get
a penalty" aka the drafting rules summary:
www.johnmeyer.net/EN/USAT/message.html
