fix: render athlete pages instead of 404ing on every profile

[rootulp]

Problem

Multiple users (a Reddit comment with 7 upvotes, then reproduced directly: searching Rootul Patel → /athlete/rootul-patel--us-m → 404, despite 12 real races) hit a 404 when clicking a search result through to an athlete's profile.

Root cause

The /athlete/[slug] edge page fetches a gzipped profile shard and relied on a hand-set Content-Encoding: gzip header so the HTTP layer would auto-decompress it. Vercel's CDN does not honor that header on public/ assets, so the edge fetch received raw gzip, res.json() threw, the failure was swallowed, and getAthleteProfile returned null → notFound() → a 404 for every real athlete. It worked locally only because next start honors the header.

The search shards already avoid this by decompressing explicitly — the athlete shards took the fragile shortcut.

Fix

• Serve athlete-shards as raw gzip (Content-Type: application/gzip, no Content-Encoding), mirroring the search shards.
• Decompress explicitly in the edge runtime with fflate (pure JS — DecompressionStream is blocked in Next's edge runtime and zlib is Node-only). Detect the gzip magic bytes so it also works where the server transfer-decompresses the response.
• Throw on a genuine load failure instead of returning null, so a real athlete never renders a false "not found"; only a missing slug within a successfully-loaded shard is a true 404.

Testing

• Added/updated unit tests in athlete-shards.test.ts (raw-gzip decode, already-decompressed body, throw-on-failure instead of false 404). Full suite: 160 passed, lint clean.
• Verified end-to-end against a production build serving shards as raw gzip (mirroring Vercel): athlete profiles render (200); previously this path 404'd.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[vercel]

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
tritimes	Ready	Preview, Comment	Jul 16, 2026 5:06am

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Review details

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: defaults

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: fafbbef6-ee5d-48de-8dd9-a695f0f74009

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 3da6590 and 01bda60.

⛔ Files ignored due to path filters (1)

• app/package-lock.json is excluded by !**/package-lock.json

📒 Files selected for processing (4)

• app/next.config.ts
• app/package.json
• app/src/lib/__tests__/athlete-shards.test.ts
• app/src/lib/athlete-shards.ts

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch fix/athlete-page-404-shard-decode

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