There are plenty of ways to slice up the WTCS. The points tally is the most obvious way of doing so, although even that can be fiddled with to create new ways of viewing the standings.
One of the most basic ways of assessing the season is by looking at the medals won. On the one hand it offers an alternative metric for consistency as well as for who the most dominant athlete could have been. On the other, it also provides a means of assessing the depth of the Series.
In this article, we will recap the medallists from the 2023 WTCS season and what, if anything, can be taken away from a comparison to 2022.
The women’s world champion, Beth Potter, ended the year with the most medals in the WTCS. With four wins and a silver medal, she had a dominant season no matter the angle from which you view it.
Potter’s achievement also puts her broadly in line with what Georgia Taylor-Brown and Flora Duffy achieved in 2022. Taylor-Brown won six medals from six starts while Duffy, the world champion, took five medals in six starts. To loosely compare the two seasons, Potter can be said to have enjoyed a similar level of primacy as her potential Olympic rivals.
In 2022, Potter actually took the third highest total number of medals, with three from eight starts. She was the only other woman to manage more than two medals and so perhaps it should not be any real surprise that she stepped up again in 2023.
In both the 2022 and 2023 season, six women won multiple WTCS medals. This continuity suggests a consistency in the depth of the Series.
At the same time, only three of the 2022 multiple medallists managed to do so in 2023: Potter, Sophie Coldwell and Cassandre Beaugrand. The likes of Taylor-Brown, Duffy and Taylor Knibb could therefore come back with a vengeance in 2024 and make for an even tougher battle to get onto the podium.
The number of men’s multiple medallists point to a deepening of the top end talent in the WTCS. Whereas there were only five multiple medallists in the 2022 season, in 2023 there were eight.
This indicates that the pool of medal contenders is growing, and at a rapid rate. At the same time, only three men won more than two medals, which is the same as 2022. The rough implication could therefore be that the fringes of the podium are deepening rather than the number of viable competitors for the gold medal.
Leo Bergere won five medals from eight starts on his way to the 2022 world title. This year, it only took two medals for Dorian Coninx to claim the world title.
In addition, no one managed to match Bergere’s total in 2023. Instead, Alex Yee, Hayden Wilde and Vasco Vilaca shared the top spot with four medals apiece.
Wilde won four medals from six races in 2022. In 2023, he won his four medals from seven events, although this season he encountered more than his fair share of bad luck. Wilde’s performances over the past two years thus point to an impressive level of consistency.
Similarly, Yee won four medals from five starts giving him the best hit rate of the men’s field. Meanwhile, in 2022, Yee won three medals from six starts. One thing to note is that Yee actually won three races in each of 2022 and 2023. On neither occasion, though, did he win the world title. Indeed, in 2023 that was only enough for 5th overall.
The lesson of the last two years, then, is that the WTCS favours consistency more than it does gold medals.
The women’s WTCS threw up even more continuity as there were seven single medallists in 2023, just like there were in 2022. Furthermore, in both seasons there was one athlete that won a single medal that managed to make it a gold medal.
Laura Lindemann’s Hamburg (2021) win made her the only athlete to have a gold medal as her only medal in 2022. In 2023, the instance was Georgia Taylor-Brown. Winning a gold medal and no other medals is a slight curiosity. Logically, if an athlete is good enough to win a race, they are good enough to return to the podium.
Whether through form or injury, sometimes the return to the podium does not quite materialise.
In the bigger picture, though, the medal counts in the women’s WTCS mean that the past two seasons have a remarkable degree of similarity.
By contrast, the men’s single medal winners represent the greatest point of difference between the 2022 and 2023 seasons.
Only two men won one medal in 2023. In 2022, that number stood at eleven. As a result, the previous argument of the deepening of the men’s WTCS podium contenders might not actually be the case.
If there were sixteen medallists in 2022 but only ten in 2023, it could be proffered that the cluster of potential medallists is actually thinning. The presence of eleven single medal winners in 2022 gives the impression that, on their day, any of a number of men could have realistically hoped to make the podium.
Had Tim Hellwig finished a place higher in Montreal, he would have taken 3rd place away from Jelle Geens and ensured that there were no single medal winners in the men’s WTCS.
However, rather than saying the pool of potential medallists is getting smaller, the reality is that the margins are so tight that a medal can go either way. It will take a one or two more seasons of assessment to see how deep the pool of medallists really is.
Moreover, previous medallists like Antonio Serrat Seoane, Marten Van Riel, Roberto Sanchez Mantecon, Vincent Luis, Kristian Blummenfelt and more are still pushing to get onto the podium. As a result, the pool of prospective medallists cannot truly be said to have shrunk in 2023, even if fewer men actually won medals.
Hellwig is actually the only single medal winner from 2022 to feature again in 2023. Geens, meanwhile, won two medals in 2022 so has halved his medal intake.
Overall, then, there are some interesting takeaways from the medal counts in 2023. Beth Potter can look forward to a major clash with Taylor-Brown and Duffy next year while it remains to be seen if the women’s Series will maintain its continuity or produce something new. As for the men’s Series, after two crazy endings to the WTCS in succession, maybe something a little more normal will be in store in 2024.
Based on the fluctuations in the medals over the last two years, though, it would be fair to expect the unexpected going forward.
