Earlier this week, we posted about the athletes with the most WTCS medals on Instagram. It was also pointed out that Javier Gomez won 11 World Cups races prior to the launch of the Series, including during a dominant 2008.
It made us wonder: how would one go about measuring claims of a triathlete being the Greatest Of All Time?
Triathlon is fragmented into different eras as a result of the creation of the WTCS. How, for instance, does one measure a world title won over the course of a season against one earned in a single day championships?
Indeed, a whole host of questions are raised by the issue of the GOAT.
Are WTCS medals the most significant metric? In that world Gwen Jorgensen, Flora Duffy and Katie Zaferes are finely balanced on 23 medals.
Maybe WTCS gold medals are the key. That would put Jorgensen and Alistair Brownlee above their peers. Winning races is, after all, the ultimate aspiration for any triathlete.
If WTCS golds are key, where do the World Cup races fit in?
As an example, Vanessa Fernandes won 20 World Cup golds in the 2000s, setting the record for World Cup wins. If we consider the World Cup circuit as the equivalent benchmark today’s WTCS, then no woman has yet surpassed Fernandes.
Then we have to factor in the Olympic Games. The is an argument to say that triathlon’s arrival at the Sydney Olympics is what transformed it into a modern sport and set the path for its subsequent growth. Since 2000, Olympic gold has arguably become the most important hardware in the sport.
Does that place Alistair Brownlee’s double Olympic gold ahead of other achievements?
Realistically, there is no single medal or championship that will determine the all time great definitively. Rather, greatness will be multi-variate and draw for separate bodies of work.
Still, there is a question of how many competitions should be included. Flora Duffy is the only athlete to have defended a Commonwealth Games triathlon title. However, the majority of the world’s elite triathletes do not compete in that competition. Would it be fair to include it in discussions of the GOAT?
Where, too, do Continental Championships fit in?
Then we must also consider the history.
The early 2000s were home to some extraordinary talent, beyond Gomez and those that straddled into the WTCS era. Emma Snowsill won three world titles and Olympic gold. Vanessa Fernandes won a world title, Olympic silver and five European Championships.
On the men’s side, Peter Robertson was a three time world champion, winning his third title in 2005.
Moreover, we can look even further back to the 1990s. Emma Carney won two world titles and her tally of 19 World Cup wins is second only to Fernandes. Similarly, Simon Lessing won four world titles, a record that has since been surpassed by Gomez and matched by Duffy.
An element of recency bias is inevitable. The athletes we have seen more recently will likely appear more impressive simply because they are fresher and more tangible. A case can also be made that the modern fields are deeper and stronger than their predecessors.
All eras of triathlon have been stacked with talent, but are some stronger than others? There is no way to say for sure.
In part, this is because racing evolves, training evolves, the world evolves. Take the women’s field. It is not a great stretch to say that, while the female triathletes of the 1990s were often great runners, a lot of them would struggle to keep up in the water with today’s field. Conversely, perhaps an argument could be made that the smaller, more fractured bike packs of the 1990s produced better and more technically skilled cyclists than today’s cohort.
Both claims are immeasurable. Does that make the point of comparison irrelevant? Maybe it does. However, it we are to include all triathlon history in consideration of finding a GOAT, such factors probably have to be considered.
The GOAT debate in triathlon will probably never end, just as it is eternal in other sports. More often than not, the GOAT will be a personal choice anyway.
The key questions to ask, then, are how do we measure greatness and who do you consider the best triathlete of all time?
