WTCS Abu Dhabi may have turned out to to be the best racing of the season, with breakaways, incredible comebacks and world championships that went down to the wire.
As seen in the splits in the men’s and women’s races, there is a lot to unpack in how the races unfolded.
The Swim
The biggest concentration of athletes emerged around 40 seconds behind the swim leader, Mark Devay of Hungary. What is interesting is that after 15 seconds, the density of athletes did not drop below 0.010 until almost a minute had passed after Devay exited. That means that the number of athletes emerging was essentially consistent for a 45 second window and that the field had been stretched without breaking.
If gaps had formed in the pack, we would see a much earlier dip in the density of athletes. Instead, that dip did not come until after a minute had passed, meaning that there was never really a moment in which athletes were not exiting the swim.
In a similar sense, the women’s field was also stretched out without properly fragmenting.
While the peak of the distribution comes later (at the 50-55 second mark for the women), there is no dip under the 0.005 mark until after 70 seconds.
That means there was no break in the pack.
In both the men’s and women’s races, the field was stretched in the swim, but never truly blown apart. On paper, that gave plenty of athletes with weaker swims a good chance to stage a comeback.
The Comebacks
In the men’s race, the podium was split between one of the key leaders of the breakaway, Bergere, and two athletes that produced immense efforts on the run to recover from difficult swims, Morgan Pearson and Jelle Geens.
Generally, when we see athletes make up over 40 places it is easy to assume that the race resulted in one big bike pack that allowed for athletes with slower swim performances to recover and improve their position. Abu Dhabi was slightly different.
While there was a large bike pack, it was up to a minute behind the leading group of nine men on the road. For Pearson and Geens, then, a sizeable chunk of the athletes that they overtook actually included breakaway athletes. With Pearson logging the fastest run of the day, they were able to overcome the deficit.
By contrast, in the women’s race, the athletes that did not have as strong a swim were unable to close the gap to most of the breakaway led by Flora Duffy, Taylor Knibb and Georgia Taylor-Brown.
Indeed, the biggest improver, Miriam Casillas Garcia, did so more thanks to a brilliant run split.
The Bike Laps
The above graphic shows how the bike lap times developed over the course of the nine laps.
You can see that after Leo Bergere had the fastest opening bike lap of the field, both he and Vincent Luis gradually tired and slowed in the front pack.
Meanwhile, as the bike went on, Jumpei Furuya and Hayden Wilde appeared to get quicker and were instrumental in the main pack closing some of the gap to the breakaway.
The faded white lines represent the rest of the field and you can see how multiple athletes dropped of the pace or pulled out of the race in the heat.
We see a similar story in the women’s race. Looking at Duffy’s and Knibb’s lines, we can see that the breakaway were faster than the main pack for almost the entire bike. The only time Knibb lost time to the rest of the field was when she crashed.
Remarkably, Duffy had one of the fastest lap times on every single bike split.
The consistency of the main group can be seen through Miriam Casillas Garcia’s chart, although special attention must be drawn to Taylor Spivey. Despite riding in a small group, often with only Kirsten Kasper for company, she and her group members managed to out-split the much larger main pack on several laps.
The Run Laps
The run lap times from the men’s race are pretty cool to study. We can see that on lap 2, Morgan Pearson run like a man possessed and was the fastest man on the course.
As Jelle Geens and Alex Yee ran together for almost the entire run, Yee’s purple line can also be treated as a proxy for Geens. It is interesting how Yee and Geens closed on Bergere for the first 5km but then in the second half of the run the Frenchman rallied to secure the win.
We can also see how Wilde began to struggle on the last lap and how Matthew Hauser snuck up on him to snatch away 6th place and with it the world title.
The third lap was pivotal on the women’s run and we can see how Duffy broke Taylor-Brown with her attack. Until then, Taylor-Brown had matched Duffy step for step.
We can also see how well-paced Periault’s effort was. Although she started at a slower pace than Duffy and Taylor-Brown, she produced a blistering last lap to match Duffy and dip under 33 minutes for 10km.
One final interesting point to note is that, after a speedy first lap, Casillas Garcia ran with Spivey for the next three laps. As training partners, both would have been accustomed to running with one another and that may have helped the pair as they achieved some of he most consistent laps of the field.
