On April 4, Australian triathlete Mirinda Carfrae was positioned to reach the podium in the inaugural Ironman VR Pro Challenge women’s race. Her competition: Jocelyn McCauley, of the United States; Angela Naeth, of Canada; Jeanni Seymour, of South Africa; and apparently, a power cord.
The 39-year-old, three-time Ironman champ had clinched second place in the race, which consisted of three stages: a 5k run, a 90k ride, and a 21k run. But suddenly the power to her bike cut out about halfway through. Carfrae and her husband, fellow triathlete Tim O’Donnell, couldn’t immediately identify the reason why. But she pedaled on and finished the 56-mile stage, despite falling off the leaderboard.
“I had moved [the trainer] the day before, and thought maybe I didn’t check all the connections,” Carfrae toldLive story, which continued to stream her race even after the severed connection, they discovered the culprit wasn’t an unfortunate lapse in technology. It was O’Donnell. For some laughs and cheeky intimidation, O’Donnell had grabbed two of Carfrae’s Ironman world champion trophies—she has three but O’Donnell admits he can only carry two at a time—and walked behind the
to show off the hardware to the camera. As he did this, he unknowingly tripped over the trainer’s cord, unplugged it from the wall, and disconnected his wife’s power, cutting her off from the race.After realizing this, Carfrae held up a sign to the race’s live stream that read, “This is Tim’s fault,” to which O’Donnell responded with his own sign that confessed, “My bad.” While Carfrae eventually reconnected to the race, it placed her back at the beginning. Her results were marked “unofficial.