London-born Tim Don, 44, is one of the sport’s most beloved characters. A three-time Olympian, four-time world champion, two-time Ironman 70.3 worlds podium finisher and one of the fastest Ironman athletes in history, he’s also widely known as ‘The Man with the Halo’. The odd moniker stems from his near-fatal accident while training for the 2017 Ironman Worlds in Hawaii. Coming off worst in a bike versus truck collision, Tim broke the C2 vertebra in his neck, which led to the fitting of said ‘halo’, a contraption that literally screwed into Tim’s skull. Four years on, we’re chatting with ‘The Don’ over Zoom from his home in Loughborough…
220: We’re celebrating 400 issues, Tim, and over the years you’ve featured in, and on, a fair few.
TIM DON: Yeah, I was getting the Christmas decorations down and came across one of my boxes of 220. It was 1993. I’ve still got all of them. I think I had my first cover in 1998, I’ve got it framed. When I was younger, the mag was the Holy Grail. You lived for the magazine to come out. You wanted to see who’d done what and where, and wanted to know about the latest technologies. And then as I got a little bit better, I just wanted to be in the mag. It’s just a real staple in our sport.
220: What would you tell 1990s Tim now?
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