More thoughts on this.
Around the world, Ironman runs open public events, generally sanctioned by national federations. Most of those national federations are either in part of fully funded by taxpayers in said countries.
In any case, Ironman is not running private events behind closed doors.
They are running public events open to anyone.
- It is public domain news who is racing at these events
- It is public domain news who did what results at these events
If Ironman housed the results on a private website that is password protected, behind an intranet I think we could argue that this data is created by ironman and not publicly available, but Ironman is forced to create this data and publish it publicly to submit to sport governing bodies who then make it public in other channels.
So perhaps their only leg to stand on is that they don't authorize scraping it off their website or using their API without a fee. They did the work to aggregate and publish the news. You should pay them to just go and grab it, versus us sitting on the side of the road with a clip board and stop watches at hand and manually timing and uploading to the internet.
The raw data (the news) is public domain, but the derived data or data derivatives that they put on their website is their packaged version of the news. It seems fair for them to ask that you don't used their derived data without asking them/paying them/licensing from them. But the news is the news (the raw data). I can't see them having any ownership of that.
If Usein Bolt is on the start list for the 100m at the Beijing 2008 games and runs 9:59 is this data owned by IOC and I can't type it here, or did I watch it on TV on CBC, commit it to memory and transcribe it here without having to ask the IOC for anything or pay them for anything? I think it is the latter. It's just public domain news.