German Jan Stratmann recorded his undoubtedly finest victory today: he won Ironman Barcelona and did so in the fourth fastest time ever recorded on a Long Distance: 7:28:25. Stratmann led the entire marathon and showed a world-class performance from start to finish.
During the swim, a large leading group stayed together and after 3.8 kilometers, it was German Wilhelm Hirsch who was the first to set foot on shore: he recorded a swim time of 45:41, but then saw nine other men come out of the water within twenty seconds. These included Jan Stratmann, but also Challenge Almere-Amsterdam winner Jesper Svensson and the runner-up at the time; Joshua Lewis.
Despite the large lead group during the swim, that first group thinned out almost immediately during the bike ride. After forty kilometers, Hirsch, Lewis and Stratmann were still together and also saw Andrea Salvisberg and Emil Holm with them. The five-man breakaway grabbed a decent lead over the rest of the field, and despite some chasing groups, they continued to make their lead bigger and bigger.
In the second half of the bike leg, Lewis, Hirsch and Stratmann gave it an extra push at the front, at the immediate expense of Salvisberg and Holm, who were unable to keep up. The three leaders eventually stayed together until T2 and a large group of chasers also remained intact: yet the gap of the next men had already increased to over five minutes.
The run was made hard right from the first kilometer by Stratmann, who took off on his own. However, his lead did not become large, because even though the lead actually continued to grow for twenty kilometers, at the halfway point Hirsch was still within a minute’s margin of his German competitor. Even in the kilometers that followed, the gap remained consistently small, making the battle for gold and silver a wonderfully exciting one.
For a moment it seemed that Hirsch could still fight his way back to Stratmann, but that did not happen. In the final kilometers, Stratmann actually increased his lead, eventually winning in a lightning-fast time of 7:28:25 (fourth time ever recorded, ed.). Hirsch was second in 7:30:16 and Frenchman Dylan Magnien, after a good marathon, was third in 7:32:40.
