Triathlon is a new sport. We're pretty lucky about this. Take our rules, for example. Ratified only in the eighties, they were able to take into account new technology and changing societal attitudes not available to other sports. Take gender-equality; equal prize-money is right there, front-and-centre. Take that Boston Marathon! Or perhaps headphones; banned, outright, from the get-go. None of this prevarication and chin-stroking over the use of iPods in big-city marathons or the use of radios by professional cyclists.
On the other hand, there's a little sibling rivalry and, perhaps, we're always looking for a bit of validation from our parent-sports. Maybe that's why we jumped on aerobars when Greg Lemond won the '89 Tour by the thinnest of margins, and christened them tri-bars, because they'd come from triathlon. Well, they hadn't, they'd come from the Race Across America (RAAM) people, but triathlon got the cultural-meme nod and we're now using tri-bars, not RAAM-bars.
Continued on the TNS blog's new page here (or if links aren't working for you at http://trins.ca/2011/07/a-history-of-aero/)
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