Men
Twenty years ago, the world championships took place Queenstown and were the final competition of the year. Conceptually, this is akin to the modern WTCS and it actually is not that dissimilar to how late the WTCS Final was in 2022.
After a long year, consisting of no fewer than 18 World Cup races, the athletes toed the start line in December. The swim did little to break up the pack but on the bike Peter Robertson and Olivier Marceau launched an ambitious breakaway. Together, the pair out-split the chase by over 90 seconds.
After losing two minutes to the leading duo, Ivan Rana Fuentes had the fastest run of the day (32:08) and managed to catch Marceau. However, Robertson held on with a 33:44 split to win by 24 seconds. In doing so, Robertson became, at that point in time, only the second man to have won multiple world titles.
That weekend in Queenstown, future world champion Javier Gomez Noya also won the U23 World Championships.
As previously mentioned, there were eighteen World Cups in 2003 running from April through to November. In a similar vein to 2004, there was no real standout performer on the World Cup circuit. There were a number of talented athletes for sure, yet with so many races to choose from it became hard to identify who the definitive best were given the lack of coherence to the season.
Only three men won more than one World Cup: Volodymyr Polikarpenko (three), Andrew Johns (two) and Simon Whitfield (two). Polikarpenko won the most World Cup medals with six. Meanwhile, Rana Fuentes won the European championships in Karlovy Vary in June.
Only one race was won by more than 30 seconds and a further five were one by more than 15 seconds. As a result, the field was incredibly well-balanced throughout the year and it is hard to detect much by way of dominance from any one athlete.
Women
At the world championships in Queenstown, a young Emma Snowsill won her first world title at 22 years old. Taking the silver medal was Laura Bennett, while Michellie Jones earned bronze.
The medallists had been relatively close together however Snowsill had the fastest run and that was that. Only one woman ran within one minute of her split in Queenstown.
A large winning margin was not a huge surprise. Although Snowsill had not raced very often on the World Cup ciurcuit, she nevertheless managed the biggest World Cup winning margin of the year with an 84 second win at Makuhari.
Several of Snowsill’s future challengers were in the Junior race in Queenstown. Felicity Abram won the race and Vanessa Fernandes took bronze, while Helen Jenkins finished 5th. Earlier in the year, the future world champion Fernandes also won the Junior race at the European championships.
Anja Dittmer achieved the most World Cup wins, ending the season with three. In total, she took four World Cup medals in total, as did Barbara Lindquist, Laura Bennett and 2004 world champion Sheila Taormina.
2004 Olympic champion Kate Allen managed one World Cup silver medal in 2003. Her second place in Hamburg was actually her best ever World Cup finish and her run split that day of 33:55 was the fastest of the season. In 2007, she won a second World Cup medal, a bronze in Salford and that represents the sum total of her World Cup medals.
Indeed, her Olympic win is one of two international wins in her career (her second was a European Cup in 2003), which goes to show how surprising her win was.
