2006 represented only the second occasion that triathlon took place in the Commonwealth Games. Having made two Olympic appearances at this point, it was an important stepping stone in the growth of the sport.
Later in the year, however, the world championships in Lausanne took place under controversial circumstances. Less than two weeks before the racing began, the International Astronomical Union agreed upon the definition of a “planet” and determined that Pluto did not fulfil the criteria. As a result, Pluto was relegated to the status of a “dwarf planet”. A sad day indeed.
Men
The Commonwealth Games were held in Melbourne early in the season and Brad Kahlefeldt, Bevan Docherty and Peter Robertson took the medals in an Antipodean sweep. Tim Don was edged into fourth place as the best non-Oceanian man.
Kahlefeldt had started the season with a bang as he won the first World Cup of the year in Doha. That day he recorded a 29:55 10km run split. In the 2007 look back, we mentioned that Kahlefeldt won a World Cup with a 32 minute run split, a time that would perhaps be unusual to see nowadays. It therefore only feels right to note that he could rip a sub-30 minute split too and that, in triathlon, the times are not everything.
2006 really was Kahlefeldt’s year as he went on to win three more World Cups (in Richards Bay, Salford and Tiszaujvaros), giving him four World Cup wins and a Commonwealth Games gold for his season.
However, a DNF at the World Championships in Lausanne denied him a complete sweep.
Instead, gold in Lausanne went to Tim Don, with Hamish Carter winning second and Frederic Belaubre winning bronze. Lausanne was Don’s first senior world triathlon title and would ultimately be his only one. Notably, Don was slapped with a three month doping ban a few weeks after the event for missing three out of competition drug tests.
Meanwhile, for Carter, Lausanne would prove to be his final international race,
As the 2004 Olympic champion, Carter was one of the biggest names in the sport and a phenomenal racer. He had won the penultimate race of his career too, a World Cup in Edmonton, so went out on a high.
The bronze medallist in Lausanne, Belaubre, came into the race as the European champion from earlier in the year and later won one World Cup towards the end of the season in Beijing.
While Kahlefeldt was the leading man in the men’s triathlon world in 2006, the season was marked by a high degree of parity in the racing. An up-and-coming Javier Gomez Noya was the only other man to win more than one World Cup (he won three). Moreover, of the twenty-seven World Cup medallists in the men’s field, only seven men won more than one.
Likewise, the winning margins were incredibly narrow at the World Cup level. Five of the races were won by four seconds or less, while only four races were won by more than ten seconds.
Andy Potts took the biggest winning margin of the year in New Plymouth with a 55 second win. However that race stands out as an anomaly for the year given that the second biggest winning margin was only twenty seconds.
All of this speaks to a highly competitive field with few names able to stand out from the rest. While some men, like Kahlefeldt and Gomez Noya, were are touch better than the other leading men, there was a remarkable level of parity. One element behind this may have been the relative equality of running speeds. At only two World Cups did the fastest man run sub-30 minutes for the 10km (Gomez Noya did so in Hamburg and Kahlefeldt did so in Doha).
In a sense, with the run speeds not quite as high as more contemporary races, tactics became more of a factor. It is clear from the winning margins that races were coming down to either sprint finishes or late bursts, so saving energy early in run seemed to pay off.
At the same time, it is worth noting that the number of World Cup races likely contributed to the equality of the field and style of racing. With fifteen World Cups taking place, few athletes could race at all of them. Had there been half as many races, this article would probably instead laud the dominance of Kahlefedlt and Gomez Noya than discuss the depth of the field. Furthermore, the number of races may have encouraged the athletes to conserve energy to a degree and prioritise sprint finishes in the knowledge that there were several more to come.
Women
Emma Snowsill became world champion for the third time in 2006 and she was, until 2021, when Flora Duffy won her third title, the only woman to achieve that feat. The world championships in Lausanne, though, were no walk in the park. Racing against Snowsill were a number of rivals, including Vanessa Fernandes and Felicity Abram.
Snowsill and Fernandes were together for the entirety of the swim and the bike, however Snowsill unleashed a 33:35 run split to win by 46 seconds. Fernandes could only manage a 34:24 split and Abram took bronze.
2006 was the year that the Snowsill-Fernandes rivalry really began to take shape. Fernandes won six World Cups and gold at the European championships that season and, the following year, she would go on to switch positions with Snowsill at the world championships. Fernandes proved to be an incredibly tough competitor, winning every World Cup she finished that year, and across 2006 and 2007 she won twelve World Cups.
Snowsill, meanwhile, took two World Cup wins (in Edmonton and Richards Bay) as part of a five race winning streak. She did not race as often as Fernandes so her overall numbers were not quite as impressive. Nevertheless, when she took to the start line she was rarely off the podium.
In essence, Snowsill and Fernandes went back and forth in the 2006 to 2008 period. Snowsill took the world title in 2006, Fernandes won in 2007 and then Snowsill took Olympic gold in 2008. Part of the problem, though, was that they seldom raced head-to-head at the World Cup level.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fernandes and Snowsill shared the five biggest winning margins at World Cups in 2006. Fernandes won by 44, 63 and 82 seconds to take the fifth, third and second biggest margins. Snowsill won by 49 seconds in Edmonton but it was her winning margin at Richards Bay that took the biscuit. There, she won by a mind-blowing 210 seconds.
Snowsill also won the Commonwealth Games in 2006 by 36 seconds over Samantha Warriner. Andrea Hewitt (now Andrea Hansen) was third.
In eighth place that day was an 18 year old Flora Duffy, racing her second ever international race and first at the senior level. 12 years later she returned to Australia to win her first Commonwealth title, a gold medal she defended in 2022.
That year, Duffy would go on to win silver at the World Junior Championships in Lausanne, behind future WTCS and Commonwealth Games medallist Kirstin Sweetland. Alistair Brownlee (that name again) won the men’s Junior race with future WTCS stalwarts Alexander Bryukhankov and Joao Silva rounding out the podium.
