IRONMAN emerged as a brand during the late 70s and 80s, built by the first of its CEOs Valerie Silk. She sold the company to triathlon enthusiast Jim Gills in 1989 and he owned the brand until 2008. During that time a succession of chiefs – David Voth, David Yates, Lew Friedland and Ben Fertic – ran the brand with Yates the person who served the longest during that almost-2-decade stretch. Yates invested a lot of himself into the job; he cared; which counts for something and in my view he and Andrew Messick (who just announced his retirement from IRONMAN) had that in common.
David Yates gave way to Lew Friedland, still under the ownership of Jim Gills. Lew was a smart and savvy businessman and he held a view of the business that characterized most of Gill’s ownership. “IRONMAN is a licensing business,” he once told me and when Lew passed the IRONMAN to Ben Fertic in 2004 the business was about to change in three ways.
The first change was imposed upon IRONMAN. Les McDonald, the celebrated and combative head of the ITU (precursor to World Triathlon, the sport’s world governing body), engineered a vote at that organization’s congress kicking IRONMAN – as well as races from organizations such as XTERRA, Powerman, and Life Time Fitness – out from under the umbrella of world federation governance. That loud jettison was followed by a quiet re-embrace of these race companies in 2006. But IRONMAN reacted immediately to the 2004 decree by forming its own anti-doping program, becoming an “international federation equivalent” according to WADA, establishing its own cadre of race referees, with its own set of race rules. All of that exists to this day.
The second change under Fertic’s tenure was a style of online race coverage. The leaderboard and coverage platform you see today is pretty similar to what it was 15 years ago, the main exception that the Facebook Live platform has supplanted the one IRONMAN custom-built almost 2 decades ago. In my opinion that platform which debuted in the mid-2000s was world leading in endurance sport.
The third and ultimately most impactful change during Fertic’s leadership was a change from Friedland’s view of what the business was. Fertic decided that IRONMAN was not simply or primarily a licensing business, putting on only a single race per year; it was a race production business. Or would be. As to whether this change of direction was Fertic’s idea I’m not sure. The figure most impactful on IRONMAN with whom you probably aren’t familiar is Jesse Du Bey, managing partner at Orkila Capital, previously at Providence Equity Partners, the private equity firm that purchased IRONMAN from Jim Gills. Du Bey remains on IRONMAN’s board and has been a driver behind the scenes for almost 20 years. It was Du Bey and Fertic who engineered the sale of IRONMAN to Providence Equity Partners and I’ve heard it was really Du Bey’s idea to bulk up IRONMAN’s revenues, and those receipts could (and would) grow tenfold or more if IRONMAN produced the races rather than simply taking a license fee. Fertic’s first pair of company-produced races outside of Kona were IRONMAN Louisville and the 70.3 World Championship in Clearwater, Florida.
Some china was broken during this time. (That’s china, not China, which we’ll get to in a moment.) In my view what changed the trajectory of both IRONMAN and triathlon was the increased accessibility to IRONMAN through the North American series produced by Graham Fraser. For IRONMAN’s first 20 years you would race in Kona, or in Germany, New Zealand, Australia, or in Penticton in western Canada. Fraser brought IRONMAN races to Arizona, Florida, Utah, California, Couer d’ Alene in Idaho, and Lake Placid in New York (all under license to IRONMAN). Participation in triathlon in North America fell between 1988 and 1995 to about half its prior peak and Fraser’s races helped fuel triathlon’s huge upsurge between the late 1990s and 2010. But, for IRONMAN to be the race owner it needed to own the races. A difficult and contentious season of sales commenced, ending with IRONMAN owning its IRONMAN branded races around the world, acquiring ownership of Graham Fraser’s races as well as races in Europe.
Fertic cycled out in 2011. Enter Andrew Messick, who’s gig immediately prior was leading the most successful and highest profile U.S.-based pro cycling event in modern history, the Tour of California. He followed the business plan through organic growth of new events and the acquisition of races. IRONMAN’s growth was greatly enhanced by the careful husbanding of the 70.3 series of events and this is among Messick’s most notable achievements during his 12-year management of the IRONMAN business.
IRONMAN truly became a global brand under Messick, with races in far flung locales like Rwanda, India, Kazakhstan. IRONMAN built on a production crew anchored by those who came up under and alongside Graham Fraser, notably Roch Frey and Paul Huddle. Already the premier producers worldwide of long-distance mass endurance events, IRONMAN welcomed Rock 'n' Roll Marathons to the corporate stable in 2017.
Providence Equity Partners, which purchased IRONMAN from Jim Gills in 2008, sold it to the Dalian Wanda Group in 2015. Du Bey’s plan seemed to have worked out nicely for the private equity company since it sold IRONMAN for about 4x what it paid for it. But the timing was questionable for companies like Dalian Wanda as the Chinese government cracked down not long thereafter on these kinds of highly leveraged acquisitions. Forced to sell many of its assets the Wanda Group gave IRONMAN up and Du Bey was there once again as his Orkila Capital along with media giant Advance Publishing brought ownership of the IRONMAN back to the U.S. Du Bey again sits on IRONMAN’s board of directors.
Messick was along for that entire ride including the Chinese era. The plan was to present IRONMAN to a burgeoning middle class of Chinese who now had disposable income and free time. IRONMAN races in China came… and went. Ironically, the country of the onetime owner of IRONMAN no longer hosts an IRONMAN but is practically surrounded – from India to Kazakhstan, Korea and Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia, by IRONMAN host countries and that was all Messick's doing.
There are today more than 40 IRONMAN full distance races worldwide. The huge growth has been in the 70.3 series which, worldwide, number more than 110 races. Beyond Rock ‘n’ Roll, IRONMAN now owns iconic properties such as Cape Epic – South Africa’s MTB stage race – and the UTMB sky running series. This is a thin list of properties IRONMAN acquired; it’s almost forgotten that in 2016 the endurance events owned by Lagardère Sports came under the IRONMAN umbrella, totaling about 140,000 annual participants. In short, Messick completed the transformation of IRONMAN from a licensing company earning low tens of millions of dollars a year to the largest producer worldwide of important ultradistance endurance events.
As to the IRONMAN, the difficult period was between 2015 – when the Wanda Group bought IRONMAN – through 2022 and the end of the Pandemic. Wanda placed tremendous pressure on IRONMAN’s management to earn the (over?)payment back and that fell largely on beleaguered partners and sponsors, and on the end users. My sense tells me that the current owners of IRONMAN feel their product is properly capitalized and that pressure to squeeze every nickel from anybody with a wallet is no longer there. Accordingly, while challenges abound, whomever accepts the baton from Andrew Messick can rest in relative comfort (no more having to fly monthly from Tampa to Beijing).
During Messick’s tenure the business of IRONMAN underwent a revolution, but these were also times of great cultural anxiety and progress. Circa 2015 certain of the women in the professional ranks became harshly critical of the number of professional women on the start line in Kona (they wanted 50 women in the race, equal to the number of men; rather than the 35 slots they had at that time) and Messick was their foil. Women racing IRONMAN got what they asked for and then some. Not only are the pro world championship numbers equal men and women; women make up a large part of the announcing talent; and the world championship races are now held separately and this September the men will race the IRONMAN World Championship in Nice, France, and in October the women will race in Kona.
The tenure of a successful IRONMAN head is about a dozen years. (Some served far shorter spans.) Three have made it that long: Valerie Silk, David Yates, and Andrew Messick. Everybody remembers Valerie Silk fondly but she almost lost her event early on in 1982 (Julie Moss unwittingly saved it). A few years later a benefactor stepped in with prize money to stave off a virtual boycott by top pros. So, it’s never been easy sailing for an IRONMAN CEO, successful or no. Messick’s time at IRONMAN was the most eventful in terms of pure growth and, in context, he was hired at the precise moment triathlon hit its second peak, in 2011, twenty-three years after its first peak. Not at all to harsh on Fertic’s tenure, but Ben sailed the tailwind of triathlon’s up/down cycles; Andrew bucked its headwind.
