BIRMINGHAM: Malaysia’s sole triathlete Isaac Tan Zhen Wei may not have won a medal in the men’s individual sprint distance final at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, but at least he can brag that “I wore the champion’s wetsuit”.
That’s because the wetsuit the 17-year-old Isaac wore during the swimming discipline belonged to eventual gold medallist Alex Yee of England.
About 30 minutes before the three-discipline race began, the water temperature was still below 20 degrees Celcius. As swimming is the first of the three disciplines, it is imperative that athletes wear a cold-resistant wetsuit to avoid complications for the next two disciplines - cycling and running.
Luckily, just as the national team were looking for one, Yee, who had just finished warming up, offered Isaac the use of his spare wetsuit.
According to the earlier notification to all teams, it was stated that all athletes could only wear appropriate tri-suits for all three disciplines, namely the 750-metre swimming, 20-kilometre (km) cycling and 5km running.
Isaac, who is not used to wearing a wetsuit, struggled to adjust to it and it showed in his performance as he could only finish in 34th spot after clocking one hour, two minutes and 58 seconds, thus missing the target set for him.
National triathlon coach Albert Tan Yi Wei had earlier set him a target of finishing under one hour.
That would have seen Isaac improve on his personal best of 1:01:05 seconds that he had set at the Asia Triathlon Sprint Championship 2022 in Sejong, South Korea recently.
Albert, however, was pleased with Isaac’s achievement here, saying the teenager could have done better had it not been for the “wetsuit problem” during the swimming discipline.
“It’s not compulsory to use the wetsuit but because the water was too cold, it was necessary to do so to avoid any problems in the next disciplines. But using the wetsuit affected Isaac’s time because, after the swimming discipline, he had to take off the wetsuit for the cycling discipline.
“Anyway, we thank Yee for lending us his wetsuit,” said Albert.
Yee won the gold medal after clocking 50 minutes and 34 seconds (s), followed by New Zealand’s Hayden Wilde (50:47s) and Australia’s Matthew Hauser (50:50s).-Bernama