Kristian Blummenfelt crossed the line in Bahrain in 3:25:21, the fastest time yet recorded over the 70.3 half-distance. He blazed his way to a 1:07:00 half marathon to win by nearly four minutes and set a new world best of 3:25:21, lowering his mark of 3:29:04 set at the previous year's race. It was, at the fifth edition of the IRONMAN 70.3 Middle East Championship on 7 December 2019, a third consecutive win on the same coastal course.
How the race was decided
The morning belonged to a pack. The USA's Ben Kanute led a group of seven out of the water in 22:20, with Blummenfelt, his countryman Casper Stornes and Denmark's Daniel Bækkegård among them. On the bike the front thinned to a small group. Blummenfelt, Graves, Stornes, Kanute and Bækkegård entered T2 with a lead of more than three minutes over the chase. The times read fast, but the setting demanded caution: the course was reported at around 86km, having been cut short due to roadworks.
The decision came, as it so often does with Blummenfelt, on foot. Once out on the run it did not take long for him to establish himself, opening a 45-second gap on the second-placed Bækkegård through 4km. From there the margin only widened. He crossed the line almost four minutes clear of Bækkegård, who ran a 1:10:44, with Stornes matching his third place from twelve months earlier. Blummenfelt's splits told the story of a man in control throughout: a 22:26 swim, 1:52:03 on the bike, and that 1:07:00 half marathon to seal it.
A step on a longer road
Bahrain had become his race. Winner in 2017 and 2018, he arrived as the athlete to beat and left having lowered his own record once more. The performance sat at the front edge of a career still gathering pace. In the same season he had taken the ITU Grand Final. What followed reframed the whole trajectory. In Tokyo he became Olympic champion over the standard distance in July 2021, then sealed the short-course world title in Edmonton weeks later. In 2022 he won the IRONMAN World Championship on his full-distance debut in a championship record of 7:49:16, held the Olympic, short-course and IRONMAN crowns at once, and became the first to complete an IRONMAN distance under seven hours. Years later, a laboratory in Bergen would measure his VO2 max at 101.1, the highest ever recorded.
Bahrain was where much of that speed first showed its full shape.
