For the uninitiated, watching a triathlon can feel like witnessing some kind of religious procession. In the final footrace, the runners have something of the penitent about them, all spare flesh flensed from their frames, their unflagging gaze fixed on a point that only they can see. 

As the first runners lurch across the finish line on Paris’s Alexander III Bridge on Wednesday, some crumple to the ground, prostrate beneath the eyes of the gilded angels overhead. One or two curl in on themselves, exhausted, before clambering slowly onto all fours. A man takes three stiff strides across the finish and vomits. Some of them are sobbing. 

It is an incredible spectacle of the limits of...


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Author: Paul MILLAR