The Iron Man triathlon is still being run, but the Iron Man Pentathlon is where the TV coverage is these days. Marvel and World Triathlon Corporation, as it was known at the time, had some very entertaining legal wrangling going on early on.

Now it's just shameless cross-promotion.

That's also pretty entertaining, now that you mention it.

The pentathlon has always been a contest of the skills you want in a soldier; the Iron Man Pentathlon is unique in getting ahead of the curve rather than picking a current or historical period and building a pentathlon around it. DARPA helps with funding it, and sponsors particularly promising teams; they also hire a lot of talent out of them. The events are designed to test both pilots and engineering teams - you can count on at least one live-fire event which will usually rattle circuits as much as nerves. Needless to say hull breaches usually result in a swift disqualification and a similarly swift trip to the emergency room. Pilots are required to have some skin in the game - you can't just pick the dumb and the desperate as pilots, they had to contribute meaningfully to the engineering effort in order to give meaningful consent.

I love watching the battle of the nerds.

So I decided to build a hardsuit for the 2058 pentathlon. :D