Fort Lee, Race Officials Start Planning for Ironman U.S. Championship

The World Triathlon Corporation and New York City Triathlon are sponsoring the 2012 Ironman U.S. Championship on Aug. 11. The race will be the first-ever Ironman competition to take place in the New York City/New Jersey metropolitan area, and the Borough of Fort Lee is in the early stages of planning its important role and taking the opportunity to make it a big community event as well, as thousands of athletes, spectators and media are expected to descend upon the borough.

“It is going to be a globally televised event; we are expecting many, many people,” said Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich. “It’s going to really bring Fort Lee incredible publicity, and we’re trying to create an atmosphere in town before it and during it as a [community] celebration.”

Last week, borough officials, department heads from emergency services, police, fire and others met with race organizers for a kickoff meeting in what was likely to be the first of many such planning meetings over the next several months leading up to the event, Sokolich said.

“We had about 25 or 30 key employees and department heads and some members of the Council,” the mayor said. “I had the race organizers and sponsors talk about the race, what was going to be going on and what we’re going to be looking to accomplish over course of the next few months while we ready ourselves.”

The 140.6-mile race will take place in parts of both New York City and New Jersey, making it “the most metropolitan environment ever to host an Ironman,” according to race organizers.

The course will include a 2.4-mile swim in the Hudson River, a 112-mile bike ride on the Palisades Interstate Parkway in Bergen and Rockland Counties and a 26.2-mile run, beginning in Fort Lee, crossing the George Washington Bridge and ending at Riverside Park at 81st Street in Manhattan.

The event will start at Ross Dock in Fort Lee, where ferries will take the 3,000 athletes up the river so they can swim back down. Back at Ross Dock, where race organizers will construct temporary docks, participants will switch over to bicycles, do two roughly 60-mile loops “through the cliffs,” as Sokolich put it, up and back on the PIP, including part of Hudson Terrace, and then make the transition and begin their marathon-distance run, again partly on Hudson Terrace.

 “There will be helicopters, there will be bleachers, there will be concerts, and actually, we’re asking St. Rocco to coordinate the last night of their feast to catch the race so they’ll get the benefit of all of these people being around for concerts and food,” Sokolich said. “Ultimately, they ride for a mile-and-a-half or so on Hudson Terrace in that part of Fort Lee. There will be bleachers set up, and there will be many, many people watching.”

Fort Lee Councilman Joseph Cervieri, who was part of the initial planning meeting last week, said organizers expect “somewhere around 10,000 people.”

“But it could be larger because they said 1,800 of the 3,000 [athletes] live in the tri-state area, so they expect family and friends,” Cervieri said.

Calling the logistics of planning for such a large-scale, high profile event “an incredible undertaking,” Sokolich said all expenses the borough incurs for things such as overtime pay, will be picked up by the race organizers.

Shortly after it was announced in June 2011 that the event would be taking place in the area, borough officials had discussed the possibility of having the racers make a loop through Fort Lee—possibly even past , where a community events could take place simultaneously. But Sokolich now says that’s “just going to become too difficult.”

Cervieri explained that there are too many roads that would have to be closed—most likely for the entire day—and that confining things primarily to Hudson Terrace presents plenty of challenges as it is.

“What happens is that from the time the first person goes to the last person, there could be a five- or six-hour differential because they all are finishing that [112] miles of biking before they hit the streets to begin their marathon run,” Cervieri said. “As it is … you still have to allow for emergency vehicles and people who actually live on Hudson Terrace to be able to get home.”

Instead, Sokolich said, the Hudson Terrace area and the Fort Lee section of the are likely to be used for community activities surrounding the event.

“We’re hopeful to have a battle of the bands,” Sokolich said by way of example. “It’s going to be a very festive and celebratory atmosphere. It’s happening, and we’re excited about it. We’re really the hub; we’re really the nucleus of this whole thing.”

For more information on the 2012 Ironman U.S. Championship, visit the website dedicated to the event, which includes a countdown in days, hours, minutes and seconds—at the time of publication the big event was only about 220-and-a-half days away.

Patch will have continued coverage leading up to the triathlon.