Category: Comment

Athletes We Are Looking Forward to Seeing Back This Year

Benjamin Eastman

There might just be no better story in sport than a comeback. In 2023, there are a number of triathletes that will embark on comebacks to the elite scene after challenging years in 2022. Injury and personal circumstances hit us all. As such, the returns of the athletes listed will inspire a great many people. We have opted to not include athletes that had injuries in 2022 but were still able to come back before the end of the season. Such athletes include Leonie Periault, who produced a fine performance…

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Which Athletes Will Win At The Global Triathlon Awards?

Benjamin Eastman

Tomorrow the inaugural Global Triathlon Awards will take place in Nice, France. The awards are a collaboration between World Triathlon and two private enterprises: Super League Triathlon and the PTO. In this article we are surveying the athlete prizes on offer: Female Athlete of the Year, Male Athlete of the Year and Rookie of the Year. The criteria for what earns an athlete the respective awards are a little vague in parts. It is also hard to tell whether WTCS racing, long distance racing or Super League events will take…

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No Rest for the Wicked: 2023 Will Be a Season on Overdrive

Benjamin Eastman

Following World Triathlon’s announcement of two additional WTCS races for 2023, the schedule for the season looks packed. With Cagliari and Yokohama being added, the WTCS season has grown noticeably. One thing that stands out in the new calendar is the concentration of races. In the span of three months, the world’s best triathletes will take on five WTCS events and the all-important Paris Test Event. As seen in a number of Olympic selection policies already, the Paris Test Event is of central importance to many hopes and dreams of…

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The Untapped Potential of Asian and African Triathlon

Benjamin Eastman

Recently, we received a question from one of our followers on Instagram. They were curious about the reasons behind a lack of representation in triathlon from Asia and Africa, beyond notable exceptions from Japan and South Africa. It is a good question to ask and one that will need to be addressed for the sport to continue to grow. Asia is currently home to over half of the world’s population, while Africa is the second most populous continent and is home to about 50% more people than Europe. By the…

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An Olympic Sized Question for the Future of Triathlon

Benjamin Eastman

Where is triathlon going? As things currently stand, the Olympic Games represent the centrepiece of the sport, the apogee for athletes that race the Olympic distance and below to aspire to. With the Olympic distance and now the Mixed Relay locked into the Games, World Triathlon has a great foundation from which to continue to grow the sport. The current dynamic, however, creates both a short-term challenge and a long-term challenge. The short-term challenge will be to reconcile the competing demands of the Olympic and Mixed Relay distances. As much…

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The Broken Crystal Ball: Our Improbable Predictions for 2023

Benjamin Eastman

Earlier this week, we highlighted six younger athletes to keep an eye out for in 2023. Maybe those predictions will prove correct, maybe they won’t, such is the nature of making predictions. That got us thinking: what predictions could we make that would almost certainly be wrong, yet would not be impossible? When they ultimately do not transpire, everyone knew they were unlikely in the first place. At the same time, though, they have the tiniest, almost invisible, probability of coming true. As a result, these are our improbable predictions…

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5 Things We’d Like to See in the WTCS in 2023

Benjamin Eastman

Breakaways on the bike The last two WTCS races of 2022, in Bermuda and Abu Dhabi, saw ambitious breakaways in both the men’s and women’s fields. At each race, the winner came from those breakaways and we are hoping to see more of this in 2023. We have already anticipated that breakaways may be a little more common next season (you can read more about that here). Breakaways will require a tactical or philosophical shift for several athletes, primarily the ones that do not have the run speed of the…

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Who Would Win An Intercontinental Mixed Team Relay?

Benjamin Eastman

After a hectic year of racing, we can all now breathe and enjoy Christmas. With no racing to report on, we decided to entertain a hypothetical race of our own. Namely, who would win in an Intercontinental Mixed Team Relay? To come up with the teams, we have separated athletes using World Triathlon’s continental rankings and followed their categories. For that reason, North America and Latin America are combined as Americas which gives five teams in total: Americas, Africa, Asia, Oceania and Europe. The obvious starting point is Europe. Europe…

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After Conquering All, What Is Left For Flora Duffy To Do?

Benjamin Eastman

Flora Duffy will be remembered as a titan of the sport. After winning her fourth world title this season following an incredibly closely fought battle with Georgia Taylor-Brown, Duffy is in rarefied company in the history of the sport. In addition, this year she won her second Commonwealth Games title. To go with that, her CV contains two ITU World Cross Triathlon Championships and no fewer than six Xterra World Championships. And then we come to arguably Duffy’s crowning achievement: her Olympic gold medal in Tokyo in 2021. In essence,…

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Who Are The Elite Dual Sport Triathletes?

Benjamin Eastman

With three sports to master, triathletes have no small task in rising to the pinnacle of the sport and competing at the Olympic Games. Balancing the demands of swimming, cycling and running is a physical challenge as well as a mental one and it is easy to neglect one in favour of the other or for a weakness to become a strength while a strength becomes a weakness. That balancing challenge is also part of what makes triathlon such an intriguing proposition for newcomers to the sport. Anecdotally, we can…

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Could Promotion and Relegation Work in the WTCS?

Benjamin Eastman

There can be times in which the structure of elite triathlon can be a little confusing. The World Triathlon Championship Series represents the sharp end of the sport, with the World Cup being a run below and the Continental Cups a step below that. When people outside of triathlon hear the term “World Cup”, though, they can often be forgiven for mistaking that as the premier level of the sport. Part of the issue here lies in the history of triathlon. In the 1990s, when the sport was starting to…

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Comparing the Best WTCS Debuts of 2021 and 2022

Benjamin Eastman

Stepping up to the WTCS is no small task. As the pinnacle of the sport, the World Triathlon Championship Series represents a new level to athletes. Fields are deeper, races are that bit faster and the attention is greater. Some athletes have races to forget on their debuts. Sometimes misfortune strikes and they are forced to DNF. On some occasions, though, athletes break through on their first dance and surprise everyone. Both 2021 and 2022 saw a number of strong debuts in the WTCS so, without further ado, today we…

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What Will Racing Look Like in the Men’s WTCS in 2023?

Benjamin Eastman

As we recently presented with the women’s field, the character of elite triathlon racing grows and changes over time. The same is true on the men’s side as much as it is on the women’s. A decade ago, the norm was similar to what we have recently seen in the women’s race. World-class swim-bikers like Alistair Brownlee, Javier Gomez Noya, Richard Varga and Jonathan Brownlee formed small breakaway groups out of T1 and attacked the bike. As Gomez and the Brownlees also possessed world-class runs, there was rarely hope for…

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Is a New Era on the Horizon in the Women’s WTCS?

Benjamin Eastman

Like all things in life, racing at the elite level of triathlon changes and evolves as new athletes emerge and others decline towards the end of their careers. Like artists competing over the same canvas, each athlete can paint in a style unique to them in the moment afforded by their athletic talents, leaving a vivid array of colours, styles and crafts over the years as athlete after athlete leaves their mark. Like any revolution, there will be clues ahead of time for how these changes will look. We will…

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Hunting for WTCS Locations and Finding the Right Ones

Benjamin Eastman
Stockholm bike through T2

As a product, triathlon is built around two fundamentals. For the sport to grow and thrive, it needs its stars (the athletes) and a stage for them to perform upon. Everything else is largely tangential. For years now, short distance athletes have torn up the WTCS and produced sensational performances, not least in the most recent WTCS Final in Abu Dhabi. Their stage, though, is something that will require careful planning and consideration in the coming years. There are races on the WTCS circuit, such as Hamburg and Yokohama, that…

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