The return of Kristian Blummenfelt to the World Triathlon Championship Series has been something triathlon fans around the world have anticipated with bated breath.
However, his comeback has yet to truly take off.
A silver medal at the Bergen World Cup last August was a promising start. Then came 6th and 8th place finishes at WTCS Bermuda and the WTCS Final in Abu Dhabi, respectively.
Both were solid results. Yet when stacked up against his former levels, particularly as an Olympic champion, Series winner and three time WTCS gold medallist, they indicated Blummenfelt had some distance to go before he returned to the highest echelon of the sport.
Prior to the start of the 2023 season, he was considered among the four favourites to take the world title.
At the opening race in Abu Dhabi, though, he was nowhere to be seen.
After his antics in long distance racing over the past 18 months, expectations were high for Blummenfelt’s return. Furthermore his extraordinary performances in 2021 in the WTCS and at the Olympic Games left a powerful imprint of the collective imagination of the triathlon world. If he could return to such heights, surely he could win again.
The reality has proven somewhat different.
After a (harshly speaking) underwhelming opening salvo, Blummenfelt’s coach Olav Aleksander Bu has now announced that his charge will not be prioritising the WTCS in 2023.
With long distance ambitions still on his mind, he will try to juggle gaining Olympic qualification with long distance racing. As a result, his hopes of winning the Series in 2023 seem to be over before they have even begun.
In Bu’s words, “we’ve decided the overall World Triathlon Championship Series title is not something that is on our table for this year – next year for sure, but not this year.”
There are several elements to unpack from this announcement.
To start with, it signals a tacit acknowledgement that Blummenfelt’s return has not gone to plan. The narrative from the Norwegian team has been that Paris is the priority yet at the same time this season, the year before the Olympic Games, Blummenfelt’s long distance ranking is a bigger priority than how he fares in the WTCS. There appears to be a dissonance between the words and the actions.
If Blummenfelt and his team were all in on the Olympics, there is an argument to be made that they would be completely committed to the WTCS and the style of racing he will have to perfect to defend his Olympic title. The Games are 15 months away. If he has written off 2023 as purely a qualification year and not as a competitive season, he will have barely 9 months to turn himself from top-10 material into a race winner.
One thing that has been notable since Blummenfelt returned is how the sport moved on in his absence. At the front end of the race, a French vanguard have pushed the swim to new heights, especially over the Olympic distance. Blummenfelt has not shown the speed in the water at any point in his career to match the level the front of the field now displays.
Meanwhile, at the back end of the race on the run, the likes of Alex Yee, Hayden Wilde and Morgan Pearson are some of the best runners the sport has seen.
Blummenfelt beat younger versions of Yee and Wilde in Tokyo. In Paris, though, he will have to contend with the evolved versions of both.
At face value, he cannot out-swim either. In draft-legal racing he is not demonstrably better than either on the bike (indeed, Wilde may have his number on that front). Then comes the run; again, there is not anything to suggest Blummenfelt has an advantage.
Moreover Leo Bergere could beat all three of them if he gets his strategy right.
A solid block of winter training over 2023/24 will realistically not be enough to propel Blummenfelt above rivals that will have been going at it round after round for two years.
He does not have any clear and obvious advantage so any plan he has to beat Yee, Wilde, Bergere etc will be either theoretical at best or based on an image of them from 2021 that no longer exists.
Kristian Blummenfelt, then, has waved the white flag on his 2023 world title challenge. In doing so, has he inadvertently shot himself in the foot when it comes to defending his Olympic crown?
