With just days left until the Sub7 and Sub8 attempts get underway, the Pho3nix Foundation has taken a look at the kit and strategy that Kristian Blummenfelt is expected to utilise on race day.
While Alistair Brownlee has had to pull out due to injury, the organisers have also outlined the kit that the Brit was likely to use if he was still racing.
The intriguing insight comes just one day after we were given a glimpse into the kit and strategies that Kat Matthews and Nicola Spirig were going to employ during Sub8.
What kit will Kristian Blummenfelt’s use for Sub7?
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Blummenfelt’s prototype Cadex triathlon bike set tongues wagging when he raced on it during his win in St George last month and it appears as though he’ll be using the same bike for Sub7.
That bike ran on a Cadex carbon four-spoke wheel at the front and a disc wheel at the rear, while its floating seat stay, wide triple-crown fork system and lack of top tube caused a stir.
He’ll be running the bike with a 52/39 SRAM Red chainring with a Quarq power meter and a wireless 12-speed with SRAM Red eTap AXS. Finishing kit includes an ISM PS 1.0 saddle and Drag2Zero aerobars.
For the swim, he’s expected to use a custom suit from Deboer. He’s recently been spotted wearing a with Fjord 7 written on it, which has different coloured markings to the Fjord 2.0.
Blummenfelt’s partnership with Trimtex also looks set to continue. The Norwegian wore a translucent white tri-suit when he surged to victory at the Tokyo Olympics and used a sleeved version in St George.
Meanwhile, his shoe of choice is the Asics Metaspeed Sky+, which is a lightweight racing shoe complete with a carbon plate.
What gear was Alistair Brownlee going to use for Sub7?
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In the week leading up to Sub7, Brownlee revealed he would be unable to race due to an injury and that Joe Skipper was going to take his place. However, we’ve still been given a glimpse into the kit he was going to use on race day.
For the bike, Brownlee had two options from BMC. One was his Timemachine 01 Disc Premium Carbon and the other was the BMC/Red Bull prototype bike that had been put through extensive simulation and modelling to make key design decisions.
Both options would have been fitted with SRAM’s AXS 1x group with a 10-29 cassette, custom-made WattShop aero extensions, a Quarq power meter paired with a Wahoo head unit, a Zipp 585 front wheel and Sub9 Disc rear wheel with prototype Schwalbe TT tubeless tyres, a Fizik Transiro Mistica saddle and Wahoo’s Speedplay Aero pedals.
Brownlee had also been working closely with Huub to see how they could design the perfect wetsuit for the challenge. Speaking about the process, Nigel Mitchell, the athlete’s technical manager, said: “This actually involved getting a pair of scissors, cutting a few wetsuits, sending them out to Alistair and then he will put on different layers of wetsuits in different areas to get an initial feel…
“That data then gets fed back in and we’ll start to build wetsuits with different thicknesses, which we will then look to go and test where we’ll look at the drag factors there.”
The same level of detail and attention was being employed for the production of Brownlee’s tri-suit, where aerodynamics and thermal management were priorities.
“I was meeting with Steve Falkner at Nottingham Trent University,” Mitchell said. “He has been developing how the suits go together with special fabrics that help to regulate the body’s temperature.
“We’ve done a lot of work around heat acclimatisation and understanding the sodium concentration in the sweat as well as how that changes when one becomes more heat acclimatised.”