With her second place finish at the Ironman World championships in Kona, Yvonne Van Vlerken showed that her record breaking performance at Quelle Challenge in Roth wasn’t a fluke. The “flying blonde Dutch girl” is the newest ST contributor.

Benjamin Sanson is one of the most respected swimmers in the Professional triathlon world, but the enigmatic French triathlete is also know to have a great fondness for fine wine, parties and women.

In the late 80’s and early 90’s, Wolfgang Dittrich made his living as the ferocious rabbit Mark Allen and Dave Scott were forced to chase down in the marathon portion of Ironman Hawaii each year. Slowtwitch sat down with Wolfgang at a Boulder bagel shop.

The Slowtwitch forum and the triathlon world as a whole was occupied on Friday with the news that Chrissie Wellington, Belinda Granger and Hillary Biscay were leaving team TBB and coach Brett Sutton. We dug a bit deeper.

Samantha Warriner wins Huatulco World Cup and takes World Cup series title, Sarah Groff takes second, finishes 4th and top American in World Cup series, Jarrod Shoemaker takes silver in brutal heat on rugged bike

Ruben Ruzafa (ESP) stunned experts and onlookers alike as he came from nowhere to win the 2008 XTERRA World Championships in Maui, Hawaii. Julie Dibens (GBR) looked very strong as she repeated her title from 2007.

Clemens Coenen from Germany was the top age grouper at the 2008 Ford Ironman World Championships in Kona with a fantastic performance. But he impressed many folks even more by slowing down at the end to let the female overall champion Chrissie Wellington enjoy the lime light.

Ramon Serrano sent us a nice selection of images from the 2007 70.3 World Championships in Clearwater, FL to get us all pumped for the upcoming 2008 event.

Neo Pro Mark Van Akkeren currently resides in Boulder, CO among many of the triathlon elite. He is an amazingly fast cyclist, an even faster swimmer and quite possibly the fastest talking man in triathlon. Word now has it that he is bringing his running up to speed.

It is tough to do a race in Tennessee or Alabama which isn’t either organized by Team Magic or touched in another way by them. We wanted to know more about Team Magic and had a few words with Faye Yates, one of the owners.

For a guy who says he does not enjoy the physical toll of running, United States Navy SEAL David Goggins sure does a good job of fooling those of us watching from the sidelines.

I’ve chosen photos representative of Tim Carlson’s day at the 2008 Hawaiian Ironman. These photos give a nice visual narrative, I think, of the event as it was contested at the front of the race.

I’ve entitled it Morning and I think all these photos were taken before noon, Kona time. Click on any image. Afternoon follows as a separate piece. – The Editor