Tyler Barnes '00 of Burlington, Vt., competed at the 1999 World Triathlon Championships in Montreal as part of the 20–24 age-group team representing the United States. The youngest member and the only college student on the team, he finished the 1.5-kilometer swim, 40-k cycle and 10-k run in two hours, 26 seconds, good enough for 32nd place.

With Smith sunglasses and Nike among his many product sponsors, Barnes regularly travels to the Olympic Training Center at Lake Placid, N.Y., for weekend training and endurance testing sessions. Olympic triathlon will debut at the 2000 summer games, but Barnes hopes to make the Olympic team for the 2004 games in Athens, Greece.

"World-class triathletes have a career of maybe four years, so I need to have something in the bank. Bates has one of the top economics programs in the country," said Barnes, who has chosen to complete his degree in economics before devoting himself full time to triathlon training.

Though he qualified for the 1999 Ironman Triathlon Championships in Hawaii, he sat out the race rather than miss two weeks of classes in October. Once he completes his thesis on Thorstein Veblen's theory of the business class in relation to e-commerce, Barnes, who already trains five hours a day during the height of the season, will ramp up his training time and may compete in the 2000 Ironman Championships.