Ford, a sinewy 43-year-old with a shaved head, was waiting for two of his client-athletes: Jim Callerame, regional general manager of International Paper (IP), and Luis Alvarez, chief executive officer of Mexican fuel tank manufacturer SAG-Mecasa. Both needed their bikes tuned. For non-XC athletes, a bike tune-up requires a sweaty, anxious wait at an overburdened cycling shop and lost sleep over whether a year of training will be lost to some stoner bike mechanic who fails to true a wheel. Not so for Ford’s guys. Expected wait time: zero. “We’re going to walk right in,” Ford said, smiling.
XC provides its 25 athletes with what it refers to as “high-touch” service: breakfast with the pros, a seat up front at the welcome banquet, Ford at your disposal. He books your travel. He’ll find out your favorite snack is Oreos and have a pack waiting in your suite. When your kids get bored in the hotel restaurant, he’ll improvise with an entire box of Coffeemate creamers that they can use as building blocks. (...)
Callerame was in Kona to clear an item from his bucket list. Just getting to the start line had been a feat. World Triathlon Corp. (WTC), which controls the Ironman brand, metes out slots for its events on a scarcity model. The 2,500 spots for the 2013 Ironman in Arizona sold out in less than a minute. The 2,500 slots for the 2013 Ironman Asia-Pacific Championship Melbourne sold out in five. There are 30 such events each year. Most Ironman customers hate to be denied. Andrew Messick, the CEO of WTC, describes them this way: “When you tell them about the hardest one-day endurance event in the world, they think, ‘I could do that!’ ” What makes getting a bib number for Kona even sweeter is that no berths are openly for sale. This year 84 of the nearly 2,000 spots went to pros, 1,668 to people who qualified by placing at the top of their age groups at earlier Ironman events, 205 were doled out through a lottery, and six were auctioned on EBay (EBAY). The top bidder paid $45,605. (...)
Ford guided Callerame and Alvarez through the deafening beat of the Ironman expo—a carnival of metal-tube and tarpaulin tents hawking everything a triathlete could want—to a backroom with a mechanic, who immediately put Callerame’s bike on a stand. Given that nobody at the expo or on Ali’i Drive wears much clothing, one of the few ways to decipher status between Ironman aspirants is by the color-coded security bracelets on everybody’s wrists. These look like little hospital bands, and they’re in the registration packets. Orange means racer, yellow means family member, purple volunteer, and blue VIP. None of the athletes swarming around the mechanic seemed to notice Ford’s high-touch service, which is just how he likes it. Lots of big egos; best not to ruffle feathers.
Later, back at the King Kamehameha, Ford confessed that there was one perk he couldn’t guarantee: a VIP port-a-potty at the race start. “It would start a riot,” he said. “We’d need a full-time security person.” Not that all XC Ironmen wait in line for the loo. “We did have one XC guy a few years ago who was staying down the road at the Four Seasons. He rented a room at the King Kam, too, for the full three-day minimum, just in case he needed to poop.”
by Elizabeth Weil, Bloomberg Businessweek | Read more:
Photograph by Kramon
