Chris McCormack embarks on a long road to the London Olympics

Chris McCormack did not finish his comeback race in Kitzbuhel. The two-time Hawaii Ironman winner, popularly known as Macca, wants to make the Australian olympic team for the 2012 games in London.

Macca's task is enormous. In 1997 he was the world triathlon champion at the Olympic distance, which consists of a 1500 meter swim, a 40 kilometer bike and a 10 kilometer run. However, he moved on to become very sucessful at the longer distance ironman race (4000 m swim, 180 km bike, and 42 km run).

The type of speeds done at the olympic distance are incredibly fast relative to the longer ironman distances. Macca admitted before the race that he was not going to be the fastest man in the field and would have to train hard to comeback to the shorter distances. Triathletes have gotten slightly faster since he won the championship in 1997.

The swim was difficult for McCormack. He was 30 secs back at the halfway mark of the swim and had lost his goggles. He had a few guys around him most of the swim, but came out of the water 1 min 19 s back of the leaders, all alone.

Chris McCormack caught up to 3 athletes on the bike and pulled them along trying to catch the pack. However, there was a pack of 50 men in front of him.

After struggling through most of the bike, Chris dropped out of the race. It's not clear why he stopped. He did not get in a bike crash, but it's not clear whether he was having mechanical difficulties on the bike or chose to pull himself off the course. He was nearly 5 minutes behind the leaders when he stopped. He was riding with a couple other cyclists but missing the main pack clearly hurt his chances to win the race.

Brown Lee who won the race is like a Formula one race car and Chris McCormack is the energizer bunny. Macca just keeps going and going. But, It's two completely different energy systems competing.

I am interested to see whether Chris McCormack will be racing in other Olympic distance races this summer. Knowing how tough Macca's character is, I can only imagine that he will be back.