There are many ways to skin a cat.
Equally, there are several ways to win a WTCS race.
Strategy is a slightly under-developed concept in triathlon, in part because in plenty of cases an athlete’s make-up means that they only have one way of succeeding at the top level. All things being equal, the fastest runner in the field does not need to bury themselves in a breakaway to win a race.
Moreover, the fast swimmer that lacks running speed will be unlikely to plump for a run-driven strategy. In most cases, athletes simply roll with the hands dealt to them.
Nevertheless, there is scope for the concept at the top level. To be more specific, the athlete with the ability to utilise multiple strategies will be better equipped to win races than the athlete with only one approach.
Being a multi-strategy athletes creates flexibility and options in different race scenarios. The breakaway practitioner that gets stuck in a front pack of fifty men usually knows their race is done before they arrive in T2. The athlete that can win through a breakaway or in a running race can adapt to the same circumstance and still come out on top.
Within the over-arching concept of strategy, there are a myriad of tactical decisions that co-constitute the approach. When to attack. When to take a turn on the front of a pack. When to save energy. Such decisions are informed by a bigger plan.
In this article, the goal is not to unpack the tactical make-up of the various strategies available. Rather, it is to investigate which of the current generation of WTCS contenders can be considered true multi-strategy athletes.
The focus will be on the race winners from the current Olympic cycle since they provide the best indicator of who will be able to win in at the Paris Olympics next year or win the overall WTCS in 2024. An outsider could always come through, but it makes the analysis simpler to only assess the known quantities rather than the range of possibilities.
As things stand, there are very few athletes in the WTCS that can be considered as having more than one strategy.
This article will focus on the women’s Series, starting with the current world champion, Beth Potter. All told, Potter can be considered a multi-strategy athlete. The evidence lies in her 2023 season.
She won her first WTCS gold medal in Abu Dhabi by making the breakaway group and staying clear. Later, she would win WTCS Montreal and WTCS Pontevedra using slightly more conventional running races.
A key point to note is that the ability to deploy multiple strategies does not guarantee they will always work. Potter missed the breakaway at WTCS Cagliari and lost considerable time in the water at WTCS Montreal. Just because she can race in a breakaway, it does not mean she always will.
On balance, then, her running approach may be considered the safer strategy.
The 2022 world champion, Flora Duffy, is another multi-strategy athlete. There is an element of irony here given that Duffy essentially pioneered the modern breakaway approach that has swept the women’s WTCS. Her win at WTCS Bermuda in 2022 – where she rode away in a front group of two athletes – epitomised the basics of the strategy.
Duffy, though, has become a true all-round threat. Take her win at WTCS Abu Dhabi in 2022. Although she drove a small breakaway, she won the race by dropping a field-leading run split. On the day, then, she had the capacity to win no matter the character of the race. She actually did the same in Bermuda in 2022, again reinforcing how she could win in multiple ways.
By contrast, Potter won in Abu Dhabi in 2023 without the fastest run split, indicating a greater importance of the breakaway.
Georgia Taylor-Brown is the third woman that can be considered a true multi-strategy athlete. She has won in breakaways (such as in Cagliari in 2023) and in running races, like at WTCS Montreal in 2022.
On balance, the three women named so far are the only multi-strategy athletes.
It is very tempting to include Sophie Coldwell, particularly after her sensational victory at WTCS Yokohama. However, she is primarily a breakaway athlete. Her win in Yokohama came from a front pack escaping and she was out-split by three women on the run. Maybe she would have won anyway had the breakaway not stuck. The hesitation comes from the fact she has not contended for the win in a more conventional running race.
Her silver medal in Abu Dhabi this year came from a breakaway. Her bronze medal at WTCS Leeds in 2022 also came after launching a two-woman breakaway on the bike. Her WTCS medals in Leeds and Abu Dhabi in 2021 likewise followed the same pattern.
This is not to say that Coldwell cannot win without a breakaway but rather that there is not yet sufficient evidence at the WTCS level that she can. For that reason, she is considered a one strategy athlete here.
Taylor Knibb falls into a similar category. Like Coldwell, she thrives in breakaways and to date has not threatened the podium in a running race.
Both of her WTCS wins came as a small breakaway in an Olympic distance race; on her own in Edmonton in 2021 and alongside Maya Kingma in Yokohama in 2021.
Two of Knibb’s three WTCS silver medals came in similar circumstances. In Edmonton in 2017 she broke clear with Flora Duffy and then held on. In Bermuda in 2022 she rode alone behind the two-woman breakaway of Duffy and Kingma to make the podium.
Like Coldwell, when Knibb’s primary strategy comes off it can be electric. When it does not, though, she does not yet have a plan B.
Being the youngest of the women listed so far, Knibb has the greatest room to still develop and could become a multi-strategy athlete. Her running certainly has plenty of potential.
Also among the winners in the Olympic cycle is Laura Lindemann, who won WTCS Hamburg in 2021. Admittedly, it was a slightly strange race having been rescheduled because of the pandemic and falling in an awkward post-Olympic, post-2021 WTCS slot. It still counts as a WTCS win, though, and showcased how Lindemann’s strength is on the run.
To date, Lindemann has not shown the same WTCS threat in a breakaway and so can be thought of in single strategy terms.
Another Hamburg winner (from 2023), is Cassandre Beaugrand, the final woman on the list. Beaugrand also won in Leeds in 2022 and in Sunderland in 2023.
She is primarily a runner, winning her races on the last discipline. Although she is often one of the fastest swimmers, she has never medalled in a breakaway. Her profile is therefore the opposite to Coldwell and Knibb.
As with Coldwell and Knibb, she could add a new string to her bow. In her case, adding the breakaway strategy would make her much more of a muti-threat.
In that regard, Beaugrand’s win at WTCS Sunderland started to show first hints of more breakaway approach. While it did not stick, she could get there in the future.
Another thing to note is that Beaugrand might be at the vanguard of a totally new strategy altogether, which will be discussed in an article tomorrow. As things stand, though, she leans towards a single strategy approach.
In conclusion, if they are on form, women’s WTCS will likely be dominated by Potter, Taylor-Brown and Duffy as they can win in multiple ways. To that end, it perhaps should not come as a great surprise that they have swept the world titles since 2020.
When it comes to winning the WTCS, being able to win in multiple ways elevates an athlete to a new level.
The challenge facing the the rest of the extraordinary athletes in the women’s WTCS, then, is simple. How will they become multi-strategy athletes too?
