The race that has been the guiding star for many of the world’s best triathletes is now creeping closer on the horizon.
The Paris Olympic Test Event will be one of the biggest races of the season with several countries using it as a chance to determine early selection for next year’s Olympic Games. Furthermore, after the course was confirmed in April, the Test Event will offer the only opportunity to experience the Olympic route prior to the big show next summer.
Now, less than a month out, the start lists are available.
As to be expected, a collection of extraordinary talent will descend upon the streets of the French capital, including all reigning individual Olympic medallists and the 2022 world champions.
Who’s there?
The home team will be sending a brilliant squad.
Leo Bergere, the current world champion, booked his place on the start list after winning the WTCS Final last November. Dorian Coninx and Pierre Le Corre will be joining him as a result of their top-5 finishes at WTCS Yokohama and WTCS Cagliari, respectively. The former world champion, Vincent Luis, has also been added on a discretionary basis.
On the women’s side, Leonie Periault earned her starting slot with a top-5 finish at the 2022 WTCS Final. Emma Lombardi and Cassandre Beaugrand then secured their places with respective top-5 finishes in Yokohama and Cagliari. Periault and Lombardi have won WTCS silver medals this season while Beaugrand will be racing on the back of her win at WTCS Hamburg.
The full Olympic podiums from Tokyo will also be starting.
Kristian Blummenfelt, Alex Yee and Hayden Wilde will contest the men’s race while Flora Duffy, Georgia Taylor-Brown and Katie Zaferes will line up in the women’s event.
One noteworthy aspect of Zaferes’ inclusion is that she made the start list directly without being substituted or entering via the wait list. That in itself represents a significant stepping stone and highlights the progress she has made on her post-partum return.
Zaferes will be joined by a stellar team consisting of Taylor Knibb, Taylor Spivey, Summer Rappaport and Kirsten Kasper. The American men’s team will be made up by Matthew McElroy, Seth Rider and Chase McQueen.
Blummenfelt will be joined by Vetle Bergsvik Thorn in the men’s race. The European Games champion, Solveig Løvseth, is currently the only Norwegian woman due to start.
Tayler Reid and Dylan McCullough will team up with Wilde in Paris while Nicole Van Der Kaay and Ainsley Thorpe form the female New Zealand team.
Yee will have one male teammate in Paris: two-time individual Olympic medallist, Jonathan Brownlee. Meanwhile, Taylor-Brown will be up against Sophie Coldwell and Beth Potter, both WTCS race winners in 2023, as well as Kate Waugh and Olivia Mathias.
Matthew Hauser, the only other WTCS race winner this season, will lead a large Australian team.
On the men’s side, Jacob Birtwhistle, Luke Willian, Oscar Dart and Brandon Copeland will be racing. The women’s team will comprise Natalie Van Coevorden, Sophie Linn, Emma Jackson, Charlotte McShane and Jaz Hedgeland.
The current men’s WTCS Series leader, Vasco Vilaca, heads up the Portuguese team. The experienced Joao Silva and Joao Pereira will also be racing, while Melanie Santos will be the only Portuguese woman starting.
After claiming two WTCS medals in 2023, Manoel Messias will be an athlete to watch. For Brazil, Miguel Hidalgo is the other man slated to start. A trio of Vittoria Lopes, Luisa Baptista and Djenyfer Arnold will represent Brazil in the women’s race.
Jelle Geens will start alongside Marten Van Riel. As a medallist from WTCS Montreal, Geens may be Belgium’s best hope of a medal at the Test Event, although Van Riel’s form has been on the rise since making his comeback from a long-term injury. After a busy July, Jolien Vermeylen will start in Paris as Belgium’s highest ranked woman. She will be joined by Claire Michel and Valerie Barthelemy.
Spain have one of the biggest male cohorts on the start list. Alongside the European champion, David Castro Fajardo, they have entered Antonio Serrat Seoane, Roberto Sanchez Mantecon, Alberto Gonzalez Garcia and Sergio Baxter Cabrera.
Miriam Casillas Garcia and Noelia Juan are the two Spanish women due to start at the Test Event.
On the note of European champions, Jeanne Lehair will be Luxembourg’s only representative in Paris.
Fresh off a fantastic showing at WTCS Hamburg and a Mixed Team Relay world title, the German women’s team will be confident of achieving a string of high finishes in Paris. The race to make the Olympic team will be incredibly close and any one of the five German women starting could seal their place at the Games with a big result in Paris.
Laura Lindemann will be a favourite after her bronze medal in Hamburg, but Marlene Gomez-Göggel, Nina Eim, Lena Meißner and Lisa Tertsch will all fancy their chances.
Lasse Lührs, Johannes Vogel, Jonas Schomburg, Tim Hellwig and Simon Henseleit form a large German men’s team.
Rosa Maria Tapia Vidal won an astonishing silver medal at WTCS Yokohama and will lead the Mexican team in Paris. She will be pushed hard by Anahi Alvarez Corral, the winner of the Huatulco World Cup, and Lizeth Rueda Santos. Irving Perez is currently the sole Mexican man on the start list.
The Netherlands will be represented by Maya Kingma, Rachel Klamer and Barbara De Koning in the women’s race. However, they have no male entrants on the start lists.
Canada will be sending two men and two women to the Test Event with Tyler Mislawchuk, Charles Paquet, Emy Legault and Dominika Jamnicky racing.
Italy will also send two men to the Test Event: Michele Sarzilla and Gianluca Pozzatti. The Italian women’s contingent will consist of Ilaria Zane, Bianca Seregni and Verena Steinhauser.
Yuko Takahashi is the only Japanese woman on the start list. By contrast, a full five-man squad will race for Japan. Right now, Kenji Nener is the highest ranked member of the team but he will be pushed by Takumi Hojo, Jumpei Furuya, Aoba Yasumatsu and Ren Sato.
The Hungarian team is in a similar position. Zsanett Bragmayer will be the only woman starting while a deep men’s team, made up by Csongor Lehmann, Márk Dévay, Bence Bicsák and Gábor Faldum, will race in Paris.
Buoyed by a personal best WTCS finish in Hamburg, Cathia Schär will race for Switzerland. Alongside her will be Julie Derron, who will likely have taken a boost from her strong showing at the World Mixed Team Relay Championships.
Adrien Briffod, Max Studer, Simon Westermann and Sylvain Fridelance form the Swiss men’s team.
Kazakhstan will send one man and one woman – Ayan Beisenbayev and Ekaterina Shabalina, respectively – as a sign of the continued development of the sport internationally.
Several countries will also be sending one athlete.
World Cup winners Tilda Månsson and Alberte Kjaer Pedersen will be the only starters for Sweden and Denmark, respectively. Shachar Sagiv will be Israel’s sole participant while Rostislav Pevtsov will be Azerbaijan’s only representative.
Maria Carolina Velasquez Soto (Colombia) and Elizabeth Bravo (Ecuador) complete the presence of athletes from the Americas. Julia Hauser (Austria), Petra Kurikova (Czech Republic) and Ivana Kuriackova (Slovakia) likewise round out the athletes competing from Europe.
Finally, Henri Schoeman and Jawad Abdelmoula will be the only African representation at the Test Event.
Who’s not there?
Morgan Pearson, the silver medallist from the 2022 WTCS Final, is a notable absence as is his compatriot, Kevin McDowell. McDowell finished 6th at the Tokyo Olympic Games.
Neither former world champion Mario Mola nor World Cup gold medallist Genis Grau have made the cut for the Spanish men’s team. Moreover Richard Murray, a multiple WTCS medallist, misses out for the Netherlands and Gustav Iden of Norway is absent.
The recently-crowned German champion, Lasse Nygaard Priester, has not made the start lists. Aram Michell Peñaflor Moysen and Rodrigo Gonzalez also miss out for Mexico.
Britain’s male representation is also limited to two, with no place for athletes like Connor Bentley, the World U23 champion, or Jack Willis.
On the women’s side, Annika Koch’s stunning 4th place at WTCS Hamburg was not enough to see her leapfrog any of her German teammates. Similarly, Anabel Knoll misses out.
Erica Ackerlund is not on the start list having been overtaken by Zaferes in the world rankings. Gwen Jorgensen, the 2016 Olympic champion, will also watch the Test Event from the sidelines at this point.
Marta Pintantel Raymundo, Lotte Miller and Sian Rainsley are among the other notable names not to be starting in Paris.
Main talking points
The Importance of Continental Cups
An athlete’s World Ranking ultimately determines whether they make a start list or not.
It is no coincidence, then, that the start lists for the Paris Test Event are practically bursting with winners of Continental Cup races. Every win earned valuable points and helped several athletes work their way up the rankings.
Earlier in the season, Ivana Kuriackova swung through South America and then appeared at a couple of races in Asia as she accrued several high finishes to boost her ranking.
In addition, the Australian team has seen plenty of success at the Continental Cup level in 2023. Charlotte McShane won in Subic Bay and Busselton, Oscar Dart while in Subic Bay and Lianyungang, Luke Willian won in Busselton and Emma Jackson won in Melilla.
Maria Carolina Velasquez Soto used a winning streak in South America to propel her into the WTCS and now the Test Event. Both members of the Kazakhstan team, Ayan Beisenbayev and Ekaterina Shabalina, have won Continental Cups, while Barbara De Koning was almost unbeatable on the African Cup scene.
Naturally, WTCS races and World Cup events offer more points. However it would be remiss to assume that Continental Cups do not matter. Plenty of athletes have scored some crucial points at such races this year which have gone a long way to putting them on the Test Event start list.
Will France’s limited WTCS appearances pay off?
All bar Pierre Le Corre of the French starters raced at WTCS Abu Dhabi earlier in the year. From then on, though, the French presence in the Series became all the more fleeting.
Lombardi was the lone woman to race in in Yokohama. Periault took on WTCS Montreal alone. Beaugrand was also the only French woman to compete in Hamburg.
None of men’s team due to compete in the Test Event went to either Montreal or Hamburg.
Rather than maximise their opportunities in the WTCS, the French team has instead focused almost exclusively on the Test Event. Those that raced in Yokohama and Cagliari essentially did so with the intention of securing the right to start in Paris with a top-5 finish.
Once they had sealed their place on the French team, the focus then shifted to training for the event at the expense of pretty much all else. France, then, are totally dialled in on the Test Event and the Olympic Games. In a few weeks, we will have the first clues as to whether their approach has paid off.
Expect the unexpected
The lesson of the previous Olympic Test Event in Tokyo is that the race will probably not follow standard patterns. One thing to note is that at the 2019 Test Event, the temperatures were extremely hot which made for some shifts in performances.
However, some aspects emerged independently of the heat.
For example, Georgia Taylor-Brown and Jessica Learmonth were disqualified for crossing the finish line together. In what was a big call by the officials, it delayed Taylor-Brown’s and Learmonth’s Olympic selection and essentially put Vicky Holland on the Tokyo team after she was bumped up to 3rd place.
Meanwhile, Alice Betto took 2nd place in what was perhaps her best ever individual result. She was a bronze medallist at WTCS Leeds in 2017 and won European bronze in the same year. Tokyo, though, was a truly special performance and a little out of the blue.
The men’s podium at the Tokyo Test Event were also somewhat unexpected.
Tyler Mislawchuk took the win ahead of Casper Stornes while a young man called Hayden Wilde earned bronze in a breakout performance.
With Olympic selection on the line, the pressure could make for some unorthodox results in Paris.
Will it matter in a year’s time?
This is a tricky question. On the one hand, the race matters for Olympic qualification and there will be a separate article to discuss the relevant criteria for different countries.
When it comes to going to the Olympics, the Test Event obviously matters.
But what about the medallists in 2024?
Based on the previous two Test Events, it has been the case that about half the subsequent Olympic podium have enjoyed success at the Test Event while the other half did not.
Taylor-Brown impressed in 2019, while Flora Duffy was bumped up to 1st place after the disqualifications. However, Zaferes, the 2019 world champion, did not finish.
It was a similar story in the men’s race.
Blummenfelt did not finish while Yee slumped to 33rd place. Yet Wilde had a terrific day which garnered a lot of momentum for the real thing.
If we wind the clock back to 2015, we see a comparable story at the Rio Test Event.
The men’s podium was made up by Javier Gomez Noya, Vincent Luis and Richard Murray, none of whom medalled at the 2016 Olympics for various reasons. Further down the results, Alistair Brownlee finished 10th and Henri Schoeman crossed the line in 52nd place. Jonathan Brownlee did not compete.
By contrast, the women’s podium provided plenty of foreshadowing for 2016.
Gwen Jorgensen won ahead of Non Stanford and Vicky Holland. A year later, that trio would finish 1st, 4th and 3rd, respectively, with the return of Nicola Spirig breaking them up.
In a parallel universe Gomez may have medalled, or even won, in Rio but for a broken elbow. Stanford was also very close to a medal in 4th place. On balance, though, 50-50 feels like a fair summary for the fortunes of the Test Event medallists.
Half the medallists in Paris will probably medal at the Olympic Games. The other half probably won’t. It is impossible to say for sure and there are always risks from drawing parallels from recent history.
Will it matter in a year’s time then? Ask us after the Olympic Games.
You can view the full start lists here.
