Like many in shipping, Randy Giveans was in Oslo for Nor-Shipping when he heard about the smoke from massive Canadian wildfires turning the New York area into an orange-tinted Martian landscape last week.

The thought was not about his good fortune in basking in Norway’s summer sunshine, but rather his Friday flight into the Big Apple, where he was scheduled to compete in a gruelling 10-event competition to determine “the best athlete in finance”.

Change in the weather

As TradeWinds has reported, Giveans has been down this road before, having competed previously as lead shipping equity analyst at Jefferies before his April 2022 hire as head of investor relations and business development for Navigator Gas.

Fortunately for Giveans and his fellow athletes, the Gotham air would clear. So all he needed to do was board the eight-hour flight across the Atlantic with his wife and three small children in tow, drop his bags, don his Superman cape and report some 20 hours later for the NYC D10 Decathlon at St John’s University in Queens.

While Giveans, 38, didn’t emerge with the champion’s trophy, he was in every other sense a winner, finishing second among some 50 competitors and winning the 30-plus age category.

He narrowly lost an intense duel with a 27-year-old former college football player who “basically could have been my son,” Giveans quipped.

More importantly, Giveans — with significant help from Navigator and other friends in shipping — was the hands-down winner of the fundraising category, taking in $53,000 to fund pediatric cancer research and treatment at NYU Langone Cancer Center. The runner-up entry raised $21,700.

“The whole shipping community really came through in a strong way,” Giveans told TradeWinds.

“In the athletic competition, it was a tough battle and I kind of surprised myself with the second place.”

It was Giveans’ first entry in the competition since the pre-Covid 2019 event, and the New Orleans native was able to improve his overall point total and perform better in five of the 10 events.

Has there been more time to train now that the oft-hectic life of a shipping equity analyst is in the rear view?

“There probably is a little less travel than in my Jefferies days, but on the other hand my family is bigger: more kids and less travel,” Giveans said.

“Had you told me two weeks ago that I would have finished second, I would have been thrilled.”

Giveans always approaches the athletic side of his life with good humour and characteristically produced a video training for the 10 events in full suit and tie as part of the fundraising campaign.

He’s been known to swing from construction scaffolding in Manhattan in similar attire, never failing to seize a training opportunity when it presents.

The Navigator man confessed in an interview on Tuesday that he hadn’t been to the gym yet, still licking his wounds a bit from the event. So human after all, but also raring for another go next year.

“The physicians, staff, patients and families at NYU Langone Cancer Center are extremely grateful, and your generous donations will certainly be put to good use,” he told supporters.