Mark Allen on storytelling and triathlon, and why social media isn’t everything

Where do you go to stay connected to what’s going on in the sport? Instagram? Facebook? Twitter? I mean X?

I am a “Yes” to all of those. I rely on them in the hope that a random scroll will help me find some juicy tidbit about Lucy Charles-Barclay’s latest puppy purchase or Lionel Sanders’ struggle with stroke mechanics.

Why do I spend time on this kind of stuff? The answer is bigger than you’d think. I want to find something that will help me to know the person behind the athlete. What drives them, what struggles do they have? What do they do behind the curtain when the herd of sports fans isn’t peering in on them?

In other words, I want to know them as the three-dimensional people they are rather than the one-dimensional sweaty champion of the last big race that I normally hear about.

You want a multi-dimensional read? check out a story Dave Scott and I wrote about our epic 1989 IRONMAN battle. It took a lot of time and effort, but I wanted to go deep into everything that made that race something that people still remember today.

Asking, and answering, the big questions

What about you? Wouldn’t it be cool to know the ups and downs and “brotherly love” which must have shaped things in the Brownlee household as Alistair and Jonny grew up?

How did Daniela Ryf resurrect herself after what many thought was a slip toward anonymity after her win in Kona in 2018 when she came back and absolutely dominated the IRONMAN World Championship 2021? There must have been some soul-searching transformations which took place during those years. I don’t know what they were, but I’d sure love to find out.

It would make Daniela more human. And there’s nothing greater than a human who does superhuman things. Those are the athletes I’m a fan of, not the superhuman ones that I know nothing of substance about. Do I get that kind of insight on TikTok? Rarely.

We get results through our social channels. We learn who passed whom where. And yes, we might get an appetizer-sized bit of info about some personal aspect of an athlete from time to time. But it’s always the kind of thing that you learn in a cocktail conversation. It’s a dinky snippet, not the bigger picture of what makes them tick.

It’s not the truly human element that would make you either totally identify with that athlete or be completely turned off by their true nature. But either way you’d remember them. We forget results, but we never forget the character of a person.

It’s hard to get that depth in a post. But a story, that’s different!

The art of storytelling

At the risk of sounding like one of those people who talks about the “good old days”, let me give you a picture of how we got triathlon news when I raced. It came in a monthly printed magazine. Twelve times a year you got scoop on all things triathlon. We’d all check our mailboxes first thing each month when we knew the magazine would show up!

And because the people reporting only had 12 chances a year to talk about a race or an athlete, they had to make it a story. Those stories had to keep the readers thinking for a full month. They had to be memorable. They weren’t throwaway shorts that would be replaced by another one tomorrow. In fact, if an article was the only about who passed whom where, I felt like I got cheated.

Yes, back then stories were written. And within those stories the inner workings of the top competitors were revealed. You got to know their struggles and motivations. They were made to be superhuman and human at the same time. You really felt like you got to know them even if you never actually met them. Read one issue and you became a fan of the sport with a thirst for more.

A couple of years ago, Scott Zagarino, the CEO of Mark Allen Sports and a long-time ingredient in so many areas that have grown the sport, talked with me about this. He commented that one of the untold stories was the year leading into the epic showdown in Kona.

Scott knew both Dave Scott and I well. He spearheaded the idea to have us both recount the ups and downs, the decisions we made and the critical choices we were forced to make that likely only a handful of people were privy to.

We agreed. Over the course of a few months, we put together a 10-part story where both Dave and I revealed the circumstances that shaped what would become the ultimate duel in Kona. And we called it “1989 The Story”.

Each episode takes you deeper into how we focused our attention and our intentions. You’ll see the countless curves where one or both of us could have gone off the rails and never even shown up to race that year. It’s a story told from the two horses’ mouths. 100% true and honest and gritty. And so big, you can’t swallow it in one sitting. But that’s a good thing.

Perhaps it will spark the stories of today to be told. Is storytelling dead? I don’t think so. It just needs a kickstart!