I figure we have many triathletes and crossfit people on here. A competitor drowned during the swim portion of the first event. It was a 3.5 mile run BEFORE an 800 meter swim in open water. The athlete was visibly struggling to stay afloat very close to staff on paddleboards. Reportedly spectators were trying to point this out and were either ignored or not heard. His body was recovered hours later when the event noticed an athlete “was missing”. The level of negligence here is unfathomable, even for an organization like CrossFit.
Sucks to see this happen
Over on Slowtwitch there was a link to this video you can see in the background the a person who is supposedly the athlete in question struggling to stay afloat
Scheduling a swim after a run is a massive act of negligence……and the fact that there was not sufficient safety support is even more damning.
I saw this on X this morning and initally couldnt understand who was meant to be struggling and then you see it. A spectator jumps in to try and save him aswell. Horrendous.
Drowning is a silent event unfortunately.
Why don’t they require a floatie for something like this?
Lots of questions like this will hopefully get answered because of this tragedy. Very hard to watch yesterday
He must have had a heart attack or something like that. The AP article states he was a water polo player, very competent swimmer. That’s awful
You gotta think it was something medical like that. He’s also been a high end Crossfitter for many years now. I do know that something like a double hamstring cramp can completely make you unable to do anything in the water, but with his history in water polo, seems pretty doubtful. Very sad for the community, and really shining a light on how poorly Crossfit’s safety protocols were enacted.
CrossFit doesn’t care about athletes, they did pull ups and the bar was 140 degrees and everyone got blisters on pull up.
Supposed to make you stronger
Crossfit and the people they hired - so called lifeguards - were absolutely incompetent and negligent.
wild
That’s possible, and not uncommon in triathlons. The truly unbelievable thing is that event personnel didn’t even seem to have noticed he was missing until he didn’t cross the finish line.
The competition kicked off at 7 a.m. Thursday with a 3.5-mile run and an 800-meter swim. But as the roughly 40 international athletes began exiting Marine Creek Lake and jogging to the finish line, event organizers realized Dukic had not completed the event and had not been spotted for some time, authorities said at a news conference Thursday.
“I saw him start to kind of scramble. He started doing small turns and he was trying to get his head out of the water,” Learn told the station. “It was at that time we started screaming to the lifeguard, like, he needs help, and within seconds he was under and he never came back up.”
A lifeguard went over on a paddle board to where Dukic went under and then paddled back, Learn told WFAA.
Just astounding negligence on the part of the organizers.
I still remember the only time I did a ride,run and then swim " triathlon" with some friends, just for pure fun. We pushed very hard. In the swim leg I had a massive thigh cramp. Luckily I had my safety buoy, but even with it, it was a struggle reaching the shore. I could not believe how hard it was to stay afloat, like I had lead legs or something. None of my friends saw or heard anything . Never, ever again.