Since 2015, Abu Dhabi has been the first race on the WTCS calendar.
The exceptions were in the past few years, starting with 2020 when the WTCS season was abandoned. In 2021, WTCS Abu Dhabi was postponed from its usual slot to November due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, it was the host of the 2022 WTCS Final and so was also held in November.
In 2023, it returned to its old place as the March season opener.
We therefore have the 2015-2019 seasons as a model to compare 2023 against. With that in mind, there is a significant question to ask. How important has WTCS Abu Dhabi been to aspirations of winning the overall Series in the past?
Let’s start by looking at the winners.
In 2015, Mario Mola and Gwen Jorgensen won the race. Jorgensen would go on to win the world title however Mola was denied by Javier Gomez Noya.
The following season, the roles were flipped. Mario Mola won in Abu Dhabi and went on to take the world title. Jodie Stimpson won the women’s race but it was Flora Duffy that ultimately took the Series.
Then, in 2017 and 2018, neither winner of WTCS Abu Dhabi won the Series. Gomez Noya and Andrea Hewitt (now Hansen) won in 2017 as Duffy and Mola won their second world titles. In a reverse of 2015, Gomez Noya actually finished second in the Series.
The following year, Henri Schoeman and Rachel Klamer won in Abu Dhabi while Mola and Vicky Holland were crowned as world champions.
In 2019, Mola and Katie Zaferes won the race. That year, Zaferes became the second woman to win Abu Dhabi and the world title. Mola, however, came second in the Series (just like 2015) behind Vincent Luis.
History shows, then, that on only one occasion has the men’s winner at WTCS Abu Dhabi gone on to win the world title. Even in that instance, there was an unexpected twist to help the race winner, Mario Mola.
Mola won the 2016 world title in dramatic fashion after Jonathan Brownlee collapsed in the closing stages of the Cozumel Final. But for that freak occurrence, the trend would have been that no man had ever won Abu Dhabi and the Series.
Indeed, in 2015, 2017 and 2019 the men’s race winner came second in the Series.
On the men’s side at least, is Abu Dhabi cursed?
For the women, there have been two occasions in which the Abu Dhabi winner went on to win the world title (Jorgensen and Zaferes). In the three other seasons, though, (2016, 2017 and 2018) the winner did not make it onto the Series podium at the end of the season.
One of the reasons for the divergences in race winners and Series winners could be that WTCS Abu Dhabi is so early in the year. It has generally been held around the first weekend of March, at a time when most athletes have barely finished their winter base training. With a long season ahead that regularly finishes in September or later, it can be tricky to maintain a March success for another six months.
Equally, there have been a number of cases in which the subsequent world champion has not raced well in WTCS Abu Dhabi.
In 2015, 2017 and 2019, the men’s world champion finished completely out of the medals in Abu Dhabi. The same was true in the women’s field in 2016. In 2017 and 2018, the women’s world champion did not even race in Abu Dhabi.
Of course, a five year sample size is not the biggest in the world. Nevertheless, we will have to see how the pattern holds up in 2023.
Will Alex Yee buck the men’s trend and win the world title? Recent history suggests there is a chance he is cursed to finished second overall. In addition, maybe there is hope yet for the men that finished off the podium in Abu Dhabi this year, such as Leo Bergere and Hayden Wilde.
How about Beth Potter? Will she win the world title or miss the Series podium to conform to the pattern? Both Flora Duffy and Georgia Taylor-Brown can also take heart from the fact that an Abu Dhabi win has not led to a Series triumph in 70% of cases.
So, is there a curse at WTCS Abu Dhabi?
Time will tell.
