By Rebecca Roozen
April 3, 2007 -- Today the TIMEX Multisport Team camp officially wraps up in Carlsbad, Calif. For the past three days, the 50 members collaborated with many of the team’s sponsors to train and talk feedback of some of the sponsor products. Representatives of TIMEX, Trek Bicycles, Bontrager Wheels, Spenco Corp., Spenco Ironman Gloves, Profile Design, Blueseventy, Powercranks, Trigger Point Technologies, Gaiam and Dedicated Athlete arrived at this early-season camp excited about the Team TIMEX athletes and how these companies can improve their products with the help of these 25 pros and 25 age groupers.
In its sixth year, Team TIMEX remains a “great group of dedicated athletes and ambassadors for our sport,” says Tom Shuler of Team Sports, located in Wauwatosa, Wis. It’s great to see the returning members and familiar faces but most importantly, Shuler says, is that it’s a “very inspiring group of people.”
As far as sponsor products go, Team TIMEX athletes get pretty pimped out. “TIMEX has supported the development of new products,” Shuler says. “The athletes are constantly giving feedback on product development.”
“We’re excited because we have all this technology we’ve been working on for the last seven years on the road side of things with the Discovery Team,” says Dean Gore of Trek and Bontrager. “And we’ve spent more time in the wind tunnel than any other manufacturer we know, particularly because we did have Lance and it had so many applications in triathlon. Now that his era’s coming to an end, we’ve moved the technology enough to make it appropriate for triathlon. We want to come into this sport with the best team and that’s how we ended up with the TIMEX crew.”
Specific advancements? “We’re sponsoring the team with the Trek TTX frame we used in the research we did with the Discovery Team,” Gore says. “And then we also did geometry to make it appropriate for triathlon. And then the Bontrager wheels also have been a project. And we’re happy to have some really fast guys testing this stuff out.”
It’s a win-win situation really. Dedicated athletes get to improve their performances with the hottest, latest technologies. And companies like Trek and Bontrager get feedback they’re looking for and representation out on the course.
“The beauty of sponsoring the TIMEX team is that we aren’t focused on one particular race,” says Gore. “We have 25 really good pros and 25 age groupers and we don’t have to worry too much about the race calendar because we’ve got it well covered. We have quality and quantity, and we’ll be at a lot more races this year than you saw Trek at previously, because of this.”