Greek Panagiotis Bitados has just provided a nice stunt by winning the Ironman 70.3 Tallinn European Championship. After a wonderful race, he struck during the run to eventually walk away with the European title.
In a beautiful setting, it was – rather surprisingly – German Hannes Butters who led the pace during the swim and also returned solo first to T1. He did so with a swim time of 21:07 minutes, which gave him a lead of half a minute over a considerable chasing group. Biggest absentee in that group was defending champion Pieter Heemeryck; the Belgian athlete followed out of the water in 22nd position and was then looking at a gap of nearly two minutes.
Butters apparently had a good day, because even on the bike he stayed ahead for quite a while. In the first kilometers a lot of things happened behind him, but it was especially noticeable that his lead gradually increased. After about thirty kilometers, Butters was 54 seconds ahead of Nils Lorenz, with a larger group of thirteen men following shortly behind, including Robert Kallin, Jelle Geens, Justus Nieschlag, Samuel Dickinson and also a strong riding Heemeryck.
Still, Butters didn’t let himself get crazy and kept pushing very impressively at the front. It kept him in the lead for dozens of kilometers, but after seventy kilometers that was really over. That was because Kallin rode to the front on his own and not much later he rode away from Butters.
So, it was Kallin who started the half marathon first, even though Butters managed to limit the damage to a deficit of just 26 seconds in T2. Behind those two men, it was German Leonard Arnold who started the run in third position with a 2:24 minute gap. In contrast, the group with Heemeryck and Geens had significantly lost time and followed at more than 3:30 minutes.
During the run, it quickly became apparent that Kallin could not maintain his lead position; Arnold ran much faster and took over the lead in the race after only a few kilometers. Yet that didn’t last long for Arnold either, as there was a man running even faster; the Greek Panagiotis Bitados – who was in Heemeryck’s group during the bike ride – was closing a gap of over three minutes within eight kilometers, joining Arnold. From then on, an extraordinary scenario unfolded, with Bitados starting to run ahead of Arnold, looking over his shoulder halfway through the half-marathon and suddenly started sprinting. That sprint was not long enough, however, as Arnold conceded only a few meters and soon rejoined.
Yet it became even more beautiful and exciting, as Bitados repeated his remarkable trick just once again and pulled another such sprint a few hundred meters later, and that was immediately the moment Arnold could no longer follow. Meanwhile, Geens was also running a strong half marathon, as the Belgian had advanced to third place and was only 52 seconds behind the leader at that point.
In the kilometers that followed, Bitados really proved to be the strongest. Arnold was slowly losing some time and Geens in particular was losing time pretty fast. The Greek frontrunner still looked over his shoulders a few times, but it proved unnecessary and in the end he ran to a beautiful victory and European Ironman 70.3 title in a time of 3:36:09. Arnold finished second in 3:36:45 and Geens took home third place in 3:39:13.
