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He's both History and Historian. Meet Bob Babbitt and come with us to Babbittville

Let us tell you about a place. No, wait, it’s a person. Well, it’s sort of a person and a place. It/He is part historian and part endurance sports history. If we talk about “Him”, we’d say that we think he is simultaneously, the nicest, funniest and most well respected individual in all of triathlon.

Bob Babbit

Reginald Holden

Great Expectations...that were exceeded.

Thursday and Friday of this week were big days for Coeur. We had our sponsored athlete and rising ITU star Katie Hursey coming into San Diego for an Interview on Competitor Radio, we also had a photo shoot scheduled and most importantly of all, we had a meeting planned with The Challenged Athletes Foundation.

Before we left Los Angeles, we ran by our factory to pick up a shipment of triathlon tops and triathlon shorts and then we headed south to San Diego. Our first stop was the airport to pick up Katie. She was coming in from Phoenix where she trains with the Olympic Development team. We had also flown in her boyfriend Tommy Zaferes (hey…Coeur is all about love), so they could spend some time together before jetting off to the four corners of the world for their respective ITU races. Katie arrived right on time and Tommy touched down about 20 minutes later. After grabbing a cup of coffee, we loaded up the family truckster and headed to the Mighty 1090 a.m. Sports Radio.

Katie and Andres at Challenged Athletes Foundation

Heart and Courage at Ironman Hawaii

I think we have mentioned it enough but Coeur is French for heart and the root of the noun courage. Or more precisely the abstract noun “courage” since I suppose you can’t actually touch it. While we’re on a definitional/grammatical tangent, I’ll go on to mention that courage is defined as the ability or willingness to confront fear, danger, uncertainty or intimidation.

 

So, why does that matter? To answer that question, we’ll have to go back a couple of months.

woman in wheelchair

One Coeur-ageous Athlete

We looked over to our left and happened to see one of the Challenged Athlete Foundation ("CAF") competitors in her race chair.  She was a petite woman and was at a dead stop about halfway up a hill.  For the most part no one was watching and it was apparent that her arms were about to give out.  Before I go on to tell the rest of this, I have to just say that I have re-written this next section twice and I just can't find the words to convey how incredible, inspiring, emotional and moving we found this to be.  

Minda in Kona