SPORT THOUGHTS: Race should teem with iron-willed individuals

There's an old, oft-used sporting adage: there's no i in team. Is the day looming, or even possibly here, when we flip that on its head, taking the teams out of ironman?
Okay, so I might be clambering, solo, out on a limb here, and as a populist move on the part of the organisers, culling the teams race from the half ironman will be as welcome as Hone Harawira turning up for kai and korero at the Matua knitting circle's weekly get-together.
But often it's the boldest moves that stir the most sediment.
Watching Saturday's race - and the year before and the year before that - I'm stuck on the notion that things ain't what they used to be when it comes to the teams.
As a spectacle, the Port of Tauranga half ironman is clearly still the big-daddy event of what's become an increasingly congested Tauranga sporting year. As long as the race continues to bring in the athletes, brilliant racing and spectators numbering in their thousands to the roadside, it's hard to see anything else challenging the half's status as No1.
But is it just me or has the teams' division lost much of its once-golden lustre, at the top end at least?
Backtrack a decade, even five years, and the top teams were stacked with the very best athletes in the land - household names like Scott Guyton, Sarah Ulmer, Hamish Carter, Suzy Pryde, John Monroe, Phil Costley, Jack Swart, Moss Burmester, Jonathon Wyatt, Tim Gusdell, Melissa Moon, Dale Warrander, Peter Latham and Gordon McCauley.
With all due respect to those doing the teams race at the weekend (and I'm glad it was you, not me, squeezing out 21km in that heat), there wasn't the same gilt-edged glamour among the gathering - and hasn't been for several years.  It's gotten very thin very quickly at the top end.
Where corporates and sponsors would once clamour to fill their teams with the best, often paying generous appearance money to ensure it was their lineup that excelled, the race that follows the race now seems more about catering to the masses.
There's nothing wrong with that  - just not in Tauranga in the biggest triathlon in New Zealand, where individual entries sold out in little more than an hour.
With 300 putting their names on a formal waiting list, desperate to be involved, wouldn't it be better to put their needs first? Ditch the teams and fill the course with those intent on racing solo, which is surely how triathlon was intended when it originated 90 years ago.
My standpoint is one that is likely to gain little or no leverage and I'm okay with that, although, interestingly, I found I did have an ally in several of the elite individuals I chatted to last
week.
On the flipside, a few of those with a more organisational bent, some of whom also swam, biked or ran as part of a team on Saturday, threw their hands up in horror at the mere suggestion.
Which is okay as well.