18) Roberto Sanchez Mantecon ESP
Roberto Sanchez Mantecon had a huge breakthrough performance at WTCS Bermuda. On the back of a lightning run split, he won the bronze medal.
He had steadily built throughout the season towards that performance. In the direct run-up to Bermuda, he finished 9th at the Valencia World Cup and then 4th at the Karlovy Vary World Cup.
He finished 20th in the overall WTCS last year and currently sits 22nd in the world rankings. We have him a tad higher in our rankings largely by dint of his potential.
In each of the past few seasons, Sanchez Mantecon has made a big step forwards. In 2019, he won the World U23 Championships and then in 2021 he won the silver medal at the European Championships in Valencia.
He is still fairly young too, being born in 1996. With that in mind, it is no leap to see him progressing further and this year there is a good chance he will be even better than last year. Backing up his first WTCS medal will be a challenge, but if he can do so and become a consistent threat to the podium, he will rise ever closer to the top-10.
17) Jawad Abdelmoula MAR
Jawad Abdelmoula has taken to elite triathlon like a duck to water.
Already, he was a WTCS medal (Hamburg 2022) and two World Cup medals to his name. The craziest thing about his trajectory is that he only started an international triathlon for the first time in 2021. As a result, we proposed him as an Alternative Rookie of the Year.
A strong 2022 saw him finish 12th in the overall WTCS. However, that is not to say he is the finished article.
He still has a bit of work to do on his swim to become more of a threat over the Olympic distance.
Moreover, he also has a few tricks to learn. At the Viña del Mar World Cup in November, Abdelmoula looked in full control but then seemed to lose focus at the crucial moment when David Castro Fajardo and Diego Moya attacked on the run. As a result, he took bronze in a race he looked well-positioned to win.
If anything, it is a testament to his talent and newfound level that even a bronze medal at a World Cup is not necessarily a season high for him.
The fact he has already produced performances like Hamburg despite being fairly raw in the sport suggests he has enormous potential.
In 2023, Abdelmoula can be expected to be dangerous over all the shorter WTCS courses: Montreal, Hamburg and Sunderland. Due to the lingering small question marks over some parts of his racing, he’s ranked a few places behind where he potentially could be.
However, we have no doubt he will dispel those doubts this year and push into the top-10 of the WTCS.
16) Dorian Coninx FRA
Dorian Coninx may just be the enigma of the men’s field. When he his on, he looks like he could be a world champion. When is off, however, he fades from view altogether.
With a final ranking of 27th, his 2022 WTCS was not what it could have been. However, if we walk back through the past 18 months, it soon becomes clear that, with more consistency, Coninx could be one of the best triathletes in the world.
At the first WTCS race after the Tokyo Olympic Games, in Montreal, Coninx produced a consummate performance to win the event. Contested over the Super Sprint distance in multiple rounds, he showed strength across all three disciplines and was calculated tactically. Montreal was his second WTCS victory to go with Bermuda in 2019. Given the difference in profiles, Montreal and Bermuda are perhaps the oddest combination of races to win which suggests Coninx has the ability to win on pretty much any course.
He then finished 6th at the WTCS Final in Edmonton and kickstarted 2022 with a 6th place at WTCS Yokohama. In between, he won the 2021 European Championships in Valencia.
After Yokohama, then, a strong case could have been made for Coninx being a top-5 athlete. However a DNF in Leeds and a 28th place in Montreal followed.
Thereafter, he rallied and beat Kristian Blummenfelt on his home turf to win the Bergen World Cup to go with a bronze a the European Championships in Munich.
Just as it seemed he had turned a corner and returned to form, it slipped away again as he finished 28th in Cagliari and had a DNF at the WTCS Final in Abu Dhabi.
Dorian Coninx is clearly a great triathlete. The only thing he is missing is consistency; or maybe more precisely the ability to grind out a result on a bad day.
If he gets his groove back, he will return to near the top of the rankings. However, in this list he has slipped behind athletes that had a better and more consistent 2022.
15) Csongor Lehmann HUN
Csongor Lehmann might just be the younger version of Dorian Coninx in terms of talent.
In 2021, he won the World U23 Championships in Edmonton. Early last year, he matched his previous best WTCS finish of 15th at WTCS Leeds and then improved upon it by finishing 14th at WTCS Hamburg.
Later in the season, Lehmann finished 9th at WTCS Cagliari for his first ever top-10. In between that he finished 4th at the European Championships and won the Karlovy Vary World Cup.
He did have a wobble by finishing 39th in Bermuda in his last WTCS race of the season however in many respects he had a season comparable to Coninx.
Coninx’s 2021 WTCS win ranks ahead of Lehmann’s 2021 U23 world title. However, Lehmann has been more clearly improving and has been a little less up-and-down. As the younger athlete by three years, he also looks like he is stepping up to the next level.
In the overall WTCS, Lehmann finished five places ahead of Coninx and they both only had four scores.
As he is already winning races and given time he could win WTCS races too, Lehmann deserves a high ranking. As things stand, he is a hair-width ahead of Coninx but if he keeps improving there is no limit to how good he could be.
14) Pierre Le Corre FRA
Pierre Le Corre had a strong 2022. He won the silver medal at the European Championships and had a better WTCS season than his compatriot Coninx.
Le Corre finished 10th in the WTCS despite a DNF at the Final. That came after he buried himself in the breakaway in service of team mate Leo Bergere. Had he been more selfish, Le Corre could easily have focused on his own race and would have had a strong chance of finishing 6th overall in the season. Above all else, though, he is a team man.
One thing with Le Corre is the distance does not matter. He is so consistent across all formats. After finishing 7th at WTCS Montreal last year, he went on to the the World Long Distance Championships in Samorin.
He’s a former WTCS medallist from Auckland in 2015 and Stockholm in 2016 and 2017. A lack of WTCS medals in more recent years mean that other athletes have jumped ahead, although he did come 4th at WTCS Abu Dhabi in 2021 and 5th at Yokohama in 2022.
The other two points to note about Le Corre his age and where his focus will lie. He was born in 1990 and is older than many of the athletes ranked around him. A strong case can be made for several of them still improving of this winter whereas we generally know what to expect from Le Corre at this point.
In addition, his success at Samorin may inspire him to race long distance triathlon more regularly. That would be a loss for the WTCS as he is such a strong racer.
Le Corre, then, would probably be a top-10 athlete over the course of a season however a number of rising stars have snuck ahead on the basis of their single day race abilities.
13) Matthew Hauser AUS
One such athlete that has proven himself as a single day racer is Hauser. In 2022 he won his first WTCS medal by taking silver in Hamburg. He also finished 4th in Yokohama and 5th at the WTCS Final in Abu Dhabi, memorably denying Hayden Wilde the world title in doing so.
In the end, Hauser finished 6th in the 2022 Series and there may be a case for him being higher in this ranking. However, there is still a question mark over his consistency. More than anything, we are talking about consistency within races here. For example, he had the second fastest swim at WTCS Cagliari but then in his next race missed the front group entirely in Abu Dhabi.
Finishes of 42nd in Abu Dhabi (2021) and 26th in Leeds also show that he is still maturing as an athlete.
In 2021, he won bronze at the World U23 Championships so has already progressed dramatically in the intervening twelve months. Essentially, he is still finding his feet at the very top level (in terms of working out what it takes to consistently be in the top-5).
There is definitely more to come with Hauser and he is operating at a higher level than most of his peers. It is for that reason we may be judging him a little strictly here.
As we will see when we come to the next athletes, all the athletes ranked ahead of him have achieved the same as him or better at the WTCS level. Crucially, they give the impression of being a bit more settled in their racing and winging it a tad less.
Hauser has all the potential to rise further, probably to the point of becoming world champion, but on balance he is not yet among the ten best triathletes on the scene. With the rate at which he is improving, though, that will very likely change this year.
