Walk off the steamy jetbridge at Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport on the second week of October and you may not know you have just descended into the heart of long distance triathlon, but there will be signs.
You’ll see visors, calf sleeves, and aero helmets zipping up and down Ali’i Drive at all hours of the day. Ocean-front stores bedazzled in swim, bike, and run company logos. “No one cares unless you’re rich, pretty, or have been to Kona,” t-shirts.
If you were there this year, one character you may have missed is Salomon, the outdoor equipment company taking over from Hoka as the Ironman World Championship title sponsor from 2027 through 2031. But don’t mistake subtlety for absence.
“We are not a noisy brand,” Salomon President and CEO Guillaume Meyzenq told me within spitting distance of Kailua Bay a few days before the race. “We are from the mountain. People from the mountain don’t speak much. They like to experience.”
On the surface, it’s pretty odd that a mountain-oriented brand wants anything to do with a race that takes place on a freaking highway on an island in the Pacific. But the more I dug into this partnership during my week in Kona, the more I realized it says a lot about the Great Convergence of Endurance Sport. Some thoughts:
1. The endurance athlete is changing.
Grossly generalizing from my observations at home in Boulder and at events like UTMB and the Ironman World Champs: If at one point people were defined by their sport, now they are increasingly defined by the challenge that sport provides. This identity shift, along with social media democratizing visibility, opens the door to participating in endurance sports more fluidly. Athletes who check off an Ironman may find the next challenge in, say, a 100-mile trail running race.
That means we’re seeing a lot of athletes shift from one endurance sport to another, or participate in multiple simultaneously. (I almost forgot I fall into this camp, too.) It’s visible from the back to the front of the pack. After retiring from Nordic skiing last year as the greatest American to ever do it, Jessie Diggins shifted to trail running and won her first 100-miler this fall. I asked her what emboldened her to make the transition and she said, “when you see it and it’s accessible, you think, well, maybe I could try that.”
Similarly, trail running GOAT Courtney Dauwalter has spent the last two falls running road marathons, and she famously told me after being in Kona she, too, would like to try an Ironman.
“It doesn't feel like you have to choose a bucket. It feels very much like we're all just trying to squeeze juice out of life every single day,” Dauwalter said. “All these pursuits are just ways we can challenge ourselves and do hard things.”
Steve Doolan, Salomon President of the Americas, agreed with that assessment: “There’s this elasticity of, like, ‘I can do whatever I want,” he told me.
As athletes seemingly choose to participate in events and projects that fit their identities, rather than simply conforming their identity to a particular sport, it opens the door for brands like Salomon to find new consumers and add value to existing ones. A triathlete may also be a trail runner and a skier, or even a fan of gorp core—another market Salomon has successfully helped pioneer.
2. Kona is krazy, and crazy unites us all.
Don’t let running in a one-piece spandex suit (with a chammy!) or literally everything about cycling on a TT bike fool you: the Ironman World Championship is the nuttiest endurance event in the world. (For more on this topic, see my newsletter last week.)
In other words, Ironman, like trail running or skiing, is an extreme sport. Perhaps that’s what Meyzenq meant when he said “Ironman is a mountain” at a swanky dinner on a beach a few days before the race. Mountain sports can be just as much of a psychological challenge as a physical one. Once I looked at this partnership through that lens, it made sense to me. Those people running around in 3D-printed calf sleeves have more in common with us than we may care to admit, which also goes back to point #1.
3. Salomon loves to innovate…
For 80 years, Salomon has let its products do the talking—first with ski bindings, then ski equipment broadly, followed by outdoor footwear and trail running goods. That’s led to some pretty revolutionary innovation that I’m expecting to see make its way into triathlon and then back into trail running.
Diggins told me a story about the 2015 cross-country skiing world champs, when super wet snow made for some super tricky skiing conditions. Nordic skiers often travel with over a dozen pairs of skis for various situations, but on the morning of the race her Salomon tech team handed her a brand-new pair of skis featuring a brand-new technology to handle the suction-cuppy conditions. She skied far past her own expectations to land on the podium.
“They have no ego,” she said. “They’re listening, seeing what the athletes need, and solving problems for them.”
Dauwalter shared similar stories about working with the Salomon team on the S/Lab line and shoes like the Ultra Glide. “They’re always curious,” she said. Obsessing over seemingly little details like pocket placement, for example, is how Salomon has developed leading hydration packs.
In trail running, product innovation, signing some of the sport’s biggest stars like Dauwalter and Kilian Jornet, and sponsoring certain European mountain races helped Salomon shape the competitive identity of the sport and also of the brand. When Salomon makes up its mind it's going to serve a community, it goes all-in—to the point that it’s inconceivable it could be doing anything else. That decisiveness is partly why Salomon’s move into triathlon is so surprising, and also why it's cool.
4. …And triathlon is an innovation incubator.
Building on point #3: Triathlon is remarkably technologically advanced in some ways (behold, the Omnius cooling headband + Airshade!), and surprisingly behind in others. Meyzenq, for example, was shocked to watch French triathlete Marjolaine Pierré (who recently signed with Salomon) racing with gels in her hands at Ironman 70.3 Worlds in Nice, France, earlier this fall. Her decision was the espresso machine talk at Salomon HQ in Annecy, France, on Monday morning.
“We are looking for this complexity,” Meyzenq said. “Our difficulty is a solution to solve, and now we can dig into it and try really to find a solution, a technical solution.”
From storage options to running shoes uniquely designed for the racing and training needs of athletes on their feet for one billion hours a day, triathlon has plenty of places for Salomon to step in and change the game. They’re already making moves for athlete-led product development with the signing of 2025 Ironman World Champion Casper Stornes. (He devastatingly crashed during a hurricane in Hawaii two weeks before this year’s race.) I expect this R&D will make its way back to trail-ultrarunning, particularly for road-ultra footwear, pockets, and other ways to carry stuff. Throw cooling and quick-drying fabrics and maybe an aerodynamic parasol into the mix, too.
Closing thought: Are endurance sports converging?
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