While the world of IRONMAN took a deep breath watching the stunning performances at the Mainova IRONMAN European championship Frankfurt, the beautiful IRONMAN 70.3 Jonkoping put on a great race, too. The men’s battle turned out to be a head-to-head race from the swim start to the finish line, thanks to a battle between Germany’s Florian Angert and Pieter Heemeryck from Belgium. The two came out of the water within one second of each other, and raced shoulder-to-shoulder all day long. Angert hit T2 a few meters in front of his Belgian colleague, only to watch Heemeryck storm onto the run course first. The whole run followed suit. At the end, Angert put everything together for a final attack. The 26-year-old gave all he could to out-sprint Heemeryck, celebrating his first IRONMAN 70.3 victory before the Belgian crossed the finish line only 19 seconds later. Australia’s Max Neumann took third place.
The fight for the lead was extremely close in the women’s race as well. Swedish co-favorite Lisa Norden led the field out of the water, but without the expected gap behind the outstanding swimmer. The group was close together when the leader embarked on the bike course. Norden looked relaxed, pacing herself well while last week’s IRONMAN 70.3 Finland champion Kimberley Morrison (GBR) worked hard to open up a gap on the Swede over the final kilometers. This plan was successful, but Morrison couldn’t stay the steady pace of Norden on the run.
Top 5 Pro Men
1 Angert, Florian GER 3:50:51
2 Heemeryck, Pieter BEL 3:51:10
3 Neumann, Max AUS 3:52:31
4 Roche, Kieran AUS 3:56:06
5 Herbst, Marcus GER 3:56:56
Top 5 Pro Women
1 Norden, Lisa SWE 4:18:17
2 Morrison, Kimberley GBR 4:19:56
3 Morris, Kerry AUS 4:24:02
4 Lundstrom, Asa SWE 4:26:22
5 Herlbauer, Michaela AUT 4:29:09