A French sweep of the women’s podium could well be on the cards at WTCS Sunderland.
After a flawless display at WTCS Hamburg, Cassandre Beaugrand will be racing again. Wearing number 1, she will be favoured to make it two wins from two races.
Up against her will be Leonie Periault and Emma Lombardi, both of whom have won a silver medal at a WTCS race this season.
They three French athletes are not just the only athletes starting with WTCS medals in 2023; they also comprise three-quarters of the athletes with WTCS medals from 2022.
Lena Meißner won a bronze medal at the WTCS Final in Abu Dhabi in 2022. However, following an injury earlier in the year, she is still on her way back to her best form. Although her swimming and cycling has been at their usual high standard, her running has not quite fired in her recent races. By contrast, the three French athletes will be major threats on the run.
Beaugrand clocked the fastest run split in Hamburg while Periault was the quickest runner at WTCS Montreal. The latter may be the most relevant as it was over the Sprint distance.
Beaugrand also demonstrated in Hamburg that she will have little to no issues in swimming at the front of the field.
Lombardi swam well at WTCS Cagliari although thus far in her career she has performed a little better over the Olympic distance. Periault, meanwhile, does not quite have the same speed in the water as Beaugrand so could play catch-up for first half of the race.
Alongside her win in Hamburg, Beaugrand won the previous WTCS event in the UK, in Leeds last June. That day she was the quickest swimmer and runner in the field in an event that contained the likes of Georgia Taylor-Brown, Flora Duffy (albeit after contracting COVID) and Sophie Coldwell
With that in mind, it is hard to look beyond Beaugrand for the win in Sunderland.
Periault and Lombardi will fancy their chances of locking out the podium, although there are several other athletes that will be in the mix.
Annika Koch could push for a first ever WTCS medal after her 4th place in Hamburg. A World Cup winner and the silver medallist from the World U23 Championships last year, she has a record of winning medals. One big question, though, will be how much the home support in Hamburg boosted her.
Nicole Van Der Kaay finished 6th in Hamburg and will look to build upon her fine result. Like Koch, she is a World Cup winner, with her most recent success coming from a home win in New Plymouth in March. A talented runner, she could certainly take down at least one of the French trio.
On the home front, Kate Waugh may be the best chance of a medal. A British crowd could help her find a new level and her recent results indicate she could be a contender. She finished 5th at WTCS Yokohama earlier in the year and beat Koch to the World U23 title last November. However, there is one key point to draw from both of those results. Breakaways were ultimately what carried Waugh to her success.
In Yokohama, Waugh was part of the front pack that rode away from the field. At the World U23 Championships, she also launched an inspired move on the bike with Jessica Fullagar to get away from Koch (who was the faster runner).
In a straight 5km run, Waugh is probably not the safest bet to get onto the podium at this stage. However, she can make up for that with a tactical move at some point in the swim or bike.
To that end, she has several athletes that could be useful allies.
Meißner is an obvious candidate to push the swim and bike. Likewise, Maya Kingma, Zsanett Bragmayer and Vittoria Lopes could all set a furious pace in the water and break up the field. Then there is Jolien Vermeylen. Perhaps her extreme run of racing will catch up with her. If it doesn’t, she could bolster a swim-driven breakaway.
On the other hand, Beaugrand could realistically swim with that group over 750m, assuming she makes no mistakes. A break could still come early in the bike but the French woman may have the swim covered.
There could be one exception, though. Bianca Seregni could blow the race wide open in the swim. At the recent Tiszaujvaros World Cup, she once again demonstrated that she is perhaps the only woman on the circuit capable of putting 30 seconds into the rest of the field over 750m.
If Seregni gets away in the water, suddenly the whole race could be turned on its head.
While there are a number of incredible swimmers in the field, it will be fascinating to see how the likes of Cathia Schär and Solveig Løvseth fare. Neither tend to gain time in the first discipline however both are phenomenal cyclists.
Even if they lose time in the water, Løvseth and Schär could make it up on the bike. Thereafter, they have the ability to drop rapid run splits. Schär took the bronze medal at the European Championships while Løvseth won the European Games. If they can mobilise the bike to their advantage, they could threaten the podium.
Alternatively, if the field stays together, the likes of Miriam Casillas Garcia and Tilda Månsson could make a play for the podium.
On balance, though, Sunderland feels like Beaugrand’s, and more broadly France’s, race to lose.
TriStats Predictions
- Cassandre Beaugrand
- Leonie Periault
- Emma Lombardi
- Annika Koch
- Nicole Van Der Kaay
