The inaugural season of T100 racing is reaching its conclusion, with the Dubai T100 Final this weekend. It should shape up to be the exact kind of spectacle that the Professional Triathletes Organisation (PTO) and World Triathlon envisioned when they announced “the official World Championship tour of long course triathlon” in January.

It hasn’t exactly gone to plan over the course of 2024. Primarily, Dubai was never supposed to be the series ender, with one more race originally supposed to be serving as the final. But there have also been major retirements of contracted athletes (Daniela Ryf), athletes who initially avoided the allure of IRONMAN racing but opted late to try their hand at it (e.g., Lucy Charles-Barclay), and athlete injuries whittling start lists (the latest: Sam Laidlow, who with a hamstring tear will miss this weekend’s racing). Not to mention, a lot of other athletes are calling it a season, like Chelsea Sodaro:

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And Daniel Baekkegard:

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DANIEL BÆKKEGÅRD (@danielbaekkegard) • Instagram photos and videos

Still, there is much for triathlon fans to be excited for. Point values for this weekend’s race are inflated, with 55 points (20 more than a normal race) available to the winner. It means that Marten Van Riel, despite a 19 point advantage over Magnus Ditlev, could finish as well as fourth and still wind up losing out on the initial series title. The women’s series crown should come down to a battle of Taylor Knibb and Ashleigh Gentle, with Knibb holding a 13 point margin at the start.

But there’s battles throughout the field for series placement. Crucially, contracts and guaranteed starts for the 2025 series are on the line. Athletes need to finish in the top 10 of the PTO standings in order to earn their automatic contracts for next year. With Charles-Barclay not racing, she’s in a precarious position in the standings and will likely miss out on this round (although her world ranking should get her in; the six best in the PTO World Rankings who didn’t get auto-slots from T100 racing also earn contracts). On the men’s side it’s near anyone’s ballgame — anyone on the start list could, in theory, make enough of a jump in the standings to earn a contract. That’s particularly valuable for someone like Jason West, Aaron Royle, or Leon Chevalier — they’re in range on the points standings, but their PTO World Rankings may see them miss out on a contract if they don’t have an excellent finish this weekend.

What Will 2025 Look Like?

Dubai will give us another opportunity to view what T100’s business model for 2025 will look like. There is, of course, the headlining professional races. Those are also being broadcast across a wide-variety of traditional media channels or streaming services, in addition to the PTO’s unique PTO+ platform and YouTube. It’s a more robust streaming package than that of IRONMAN and its Pro Series. There’s significant age-group racing here, too, with the unique 100 kilometer distance and a sprint-distance race. There’s also The Music Run, which happens on Saturday night. In total, the PTO estimates roughly 10,000 participants across the weekend.

The calendar for 2025 is also firming up far earlier than the PTO has previously been able to confirm. Seven events are already locked into the calendar for next year:

• Singapore: April 12-13
• French Riviera: May 16-18
• San Francisco: May 31-June 1
• London: August 2-3
• Ibiza: September 27-28
• Las Vegas: October 25-26
• Dubai: November

The French Riviera event had significant detail announced this week. In addition to the headline 100 kilometer triathlon, the port towns of Fréjus and St. Raphaël will also host age group super sprint racing, an open-water swim, bike and run events, and a three-day festival. It doubles down on the type of atmosphere that made the original couple of PTO Tour events in Ibiza and Milwaukee interesting, as they were partnered with existing large-scale events (World Triathlon age group championships and USA Triathlon Nationals, respectively).

There is also a return to Canada next June in the works; permits have been approved, and it is all but waiting official announcement.

There are two potential wildcards entering 2025. The first will be the impact of the twelve-year partnership agreement between the PTO and World Triathlon, which cements world champion status to the T100 Tour champion. We’ve seen greater alignment on professional rules and start list procedure between the two organizations. And Wild Card entries to T100 events have increasingly gone towards athletes who are coming from a World Triathlon Championship Series background; look no further than Julie Derron, who will likely earn a full contract for 2025. But we’ve also seen names like Matthew McElroy, Sophie Coldwell, and Henri Schoeman filling out fields.

The second is the cost of the investments that the series is said to be making in its age group experiences. Putting on a weekend festival of events is notoriously difficult. There’s a reason why I’ve said for years that the easiest way to make a small fortune in race directing is to start with a large one. Ultimately, that investment in age group racing means there has to be offset somewhere else. Will it come at the expense of the size of the contracts awarded to T100 athletes? Will it be on the prize purse side? Or somewhere else? In the end either the revanue must go up or the bleeding has to stop.

But, for arguably the first time, the series appears to be maturing into its final form: a weekend festival of racing that, while having professional athletes at the center of it, provides a strong experience for all athletes. It makes for what should be some potential competition for age group dollars next year. And it should also make for another good earning year for professionals.

The post With Grand Final Looming, Where Does T100 Go From Here? first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Alex Yee came into the World Triathlon Championship Series Grand Final in Torremolinos needing a sixth place finish to finally earn his first world championship. That title has proven elusive, with three straight tries for Yee coming up short.

Today, that streak ended — although it took another outstanding run from Yee in order to make it happen, using the second fastest run of the day to move into the podium places and secure the world title. He joins women’s champion Cassandre Beaugrand in pulling off the Olympic Gold – WTCS World title double in the same season.

Yee, post-race, said, “This has evaded me for the last three years and makes it even sweeter. It is probably something that has haunted me day in day out and I wanted to put on a show and a smile on peoples’ faces and I’m World Champion. There’s always going to be pressure in these races… but pressure makes diamonds.”

Fellow series contenders Hayden Wilde and Leo Bergere gave it their best, blowing the race apart to take gold and silver on the day, and bronze and silver, respectively, for the year.

Wilde and Bergere were close enough out of the water to help create a five man leading effort, joined by Vincent Luis, Tayler Reid, and Simon Westermann. Yee was in the first chase group, led by swim pacer Matt Hauser, but when Hauser crashed out of the race, the chase pack slowly lost time on each lap to the leaders.

By the time the leaders had racked their bikes and swapped into run shoes, the deficit to the chasers was 1:40. The race win was almost certainly up the road, with Yee needing to put in an effort to nab the top-six finishing position required to claim the world championship. After one lap, Yee had closed almost 40 seconds on positions three through five on the road, and made the comfortable pass into a podium position just over the halfway mark. Wilde cleared Bergere, eventually opening a full minute margin of victory in one of his finest performances.

Wilde enjoyed his victory, saying “I had the same sort of plan as the Olympic Games really, two laps hard, one lap easy then go and had a really nice gap. It’s a bit disappointing not to win the World Championships but to win the Grand Final is something special.”

Race Results

Photo: World Triathlon

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Cassandre Beaugrand has claimed her first world championship, capping off an undefeated individual season of World Triathlon Championship Series racing with a win at the Grand Final in Torremolinis-Andalucia.

Although Beaugrand entered the race with a comfortable lead in the Series and the inside track for the world title, the race win was not an easy one to come by. Beaugrand took a position on the swim start pontoon on the far right and veered further and further right once the gun went off. She was forced to swim hard to the first buoy just to latch back onto the back of the field, but then would work her way further through the field over the course of the next 1000 meters to emerge with championship contender Beth Potter in 10th place.

There were 12 women in the lead pack of the bike, including Beaugrand and Potter, as well as swim leaders Bianca Seregini and Lena Meissner. Emma Lombardi was also there, setting up for a potential battle amongst the three leading title contenders (Beaugrand, Potter, and Lombardi). The group rode mostly together into transition, where Beaugrand, Potter, Lombardi, and Jeanne Lehair broke away during the course of lap one.

But it would be Beaugrand who would drive the pace on lap two, surging to drop her fellow title contenders and eventually open a 38 second margin of victory over Potter, who clinched second in the Series. Lombardi took bronze, which also moved her into third for the Series.

Beaugrand post race was delighted, saying, “I just wanted this world title so badly and have dreamed about it for so many years. Last year I was very disappointed finishing second. Nobody can take this away from me now. I was training hard and fighting all year for this one.”

Race Results

Photo: World Triathlon

The post Cassandre Beaugrand’s Perfect Season Ends with World Title first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

This week’s sizable announcement between World Triathlon and the Professional Triathletes Organisation (PTO) is a landscape shifter. The twelve-year agreement covers a wide variety of key items, with the headline one being the exclusive rights to the World Championship Long-Distance Triathlon Tour.

What it also indicates is that World Triathlon is no longer willing to cede long-course triathlon to IRONMAN or Challenge. Why there even is that split can be traced back through our sport’s history.

The History Behind the Split

IRONMAN, up until roughly 20 years ago, sat underneath the then-ITU (now World Triathlon) umbrella. The ITU was set up for one main purpose: to bring triathlon to the Olympic Games. Les McDonald was the spearhead of that effort. And he was ruthless in his pursuit of doing so. National governing bodies popped up across the world, as it was another requirement in order to become an Olympic sport. The ITU also began awarding a world championship in 1989.

It’s that series of two words that got the lawyers involved: “world championship.” The ITU took IRONMAN to court twice over the use of “world championship” to describe certain IRONMAN events. They lost. And then McDonald, together with national governing bodies, voted to toss IRONMAN, Life Time, and any other quasi-series out from underneath the ITU umbrella in 2004.

If you’re wondering why IRONMAN needs to have its own anti-doping program, or its own relationships with the various national federations it has events in, or its own rulebook: this is what it comes back to. And it can also explain why IRONMAN, occasionally, can feel like a bull stampeding in its actions: because it happened to them.

The Present Day

Between IRONMAN, World Triathlon, and PTO/T100, there are a total of nine world championships on offer in triathlon (I’m not getting into duathlon, aquathlon, etc. here).

• IRONMAN 70.3
• IRONMAN
• World Triathlon Championship Series
• Arena Games / eSports
• Cross Triathlon
• Winter Triathlon
• Long Distance Triathlon
• Triathlon Mixed Relay
• T100 Long Distance Triathlon Tour World Championship

And that’s before we start to factor in other production companies or race series and their crowns; Xterra, Challenge, what have you. It’s a fractured landscape at best.

It also results in some of the challenges that the PTO, or IRONMAN, have had in trying to create some of these so called “season long” narratives for their respective series. We have seen some athletes, like Kat Matthews, who have raced eight times this season between PTO and IRONMAN branded events. We’ve seen others, like Lucy Charles-Barclay, who had committed to T100 earlier in the year and then mid-season opted to defend her IRONMAN World Championship. It’s been a lot of back and forth.

That’s not the case with World Triathlon’s Championship Series. (Their biggest problem has been event cancellation or modification, but that’s a story for another time.) The biggest names in Olympic-distance racing race each time WTCS comes together. Alex Yee, Leo Bergere, and Hayden Wilde are all in prime position to potentially take the WTCS world title later this month for men, whereas Cassandre Beaugrand, Beth Potter, and Lisa Tertsch have the inside edge for women. The narrative exists.

That’s also helped by World Triathlon’s content distribution platform. TriathlonLive provides best-in-class streaming, whether live or on-demand, for $40 annually. It’s a steal compared to Outside TV’s $90 a year service, which has proven buggy whenever high demand events are live. (To be fair, you can only get Outside TV’s premium tier with a full Outside+ membership, which comes with other benefits. You can also watch events live for free, but on-demand requires a membership.) It makes it easy for World Triathlon to create stories, and tell them cohesively, in their race formats.

So Why the Agreement?

As mentioned at the start: this is World Triathlon deciding that they’re not going to cede long-distance triathlon to IRONMAN. As WTCS stars have cycled out of Olympic distance racing and into longer events, they’ve chased the money and prestige of IRONMAN branded events. A few names from recent history: Jan Frodeno, Daniela Ryf, Gustav Iden, Lisa Norden, Kristian Blummenfelt — all former WTCS athletes who have found great success at IRONMAN racing.

Now, with the agreement between World Triathlon and T100, it appears that pipeline will instead flow more directly from Continental Cups to World Cups to WTCS and then, when the time comes, onward to T100 racing. The beneficiaries of that appear, to my eye, the athletes currently in development cycles. In theory this addresses some of the issues PTO/T100 have had with athlete start lists and getting contracted racers to their events, as the federations have more sway over nominating athletes to T100 starts.

It will also likely reduce overall operating costs for T100 branded events. Many of these races in 2024 have been stand-alone races, which creates a higher financial burden on the organization — effectively, you’re trying to play IRONMAN’s game, and when you try to play their game, you lose. Instead the release announcing the agreement talks about the potential to use existing WTCS or World Cup venues to produce T100 events. It’s a far smarter way to operate; consider, for instance, the outstanding atmosphere at the original PTO Tour event in Ibiza that coincided with Age Group Worlds. Speaking of: it would not shock me if, in the future, the Long Distance World Championship is awarded solely at the T100 Grand Final event, in an attempt to also create more buzz, more attendees, around that race.

Lastly, this should also solve for the PTO’s greatest ambition, which has been on media and broadcasting rights. There’s now a ready-made platform to distribute content over to an audience that is hungry for more triathlon race coverage. And, well, it works. Factor with World Triathlon’s existing list of more than 25 different traditional broadcast partners and it should significantly increase T100’s media footprint.

There are still plenty of questions. Namely — will this actually last the full twelve years? Or is it a pipe dream? Will we see the elimination of series contracts as a result of deepening relationships with governing bodies? Or does this potentially change endemic sponsor behavior, and where they choose to focus their dollars and athlete contracts? Or will athletes in this newer framework be more tied to federation-based sponsorship and contracts?

One thing, though, is for certain: it feels like the divide between IRONMAN and World Triathlon could be as wide as it has been since 2004. And the last time that happened, IRONMAN grew into the company we know it as today.

Photo: World Triathlon

The post World Triathlon, T100 Tie-Up Brings Us Full Circle first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

World Triathlon and the Professional Triathletes Organisation (PTO) will be tied at the hip for the next twelve years, reaching a strategic agreement to “grow the sport” together through 2036.

The agreement includes the sole and exclusive rights to produce “the Official World Championship Tour of Long Distance Triathlon,” as well as a framework to potentially produce shorter-distance events alongside T100 Tour races. There are also provisions regarding collaborative anti-doping efforts, rights management (including media and broadcast rights), and sponsorship.

World Triathlon president Marisol Casado said in a release, “We believe that it is both ours and PTO’s responsibility to double down on the good work that we’ve already started and use the great exposure our sport enjoys at the moment as a catalyst to grow deeper engagement with the sport’s committed fan. We also want to find a way to promote our sport to the broader sports fan. We believe we’re already starting to answer part of that question through our partnership with the PTO around the new T100 Triathlon World Tour and want to ensure we provide it with the right support and solid foundation to go from strength to strength.”

Casado also specifically pointed out athletes progressing from the World Triathlon Championship Series to T100 as a future pipeline for talent development.

PTO Chief Executive Office Sam Renouf added, “We have had a very productive relationship with World Triathlon since our first event, including hosting the World Long Distance Championships alongside the Collins Cup in 2021. In working closely through the formation and then launch of the new T100 Triathlon World Tour – quickly becoming the pinnacle of long distance racing – one of the by-products has been the discussion and identification of other opportunities where we can grow the sport. By forming a 12-year partnership, both sides have the opportunity to invest together in the longer-term development of the sport.”

The next T100 race is October 19-20, 2024, in Lake Las Vegas.

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