The biggest week of the season has arrived with the 2024 World Triathlon Championship Series Finals. The action in Torremolinos will represent the 15th edition of the Finals since the maiden event all the way back in 2009 and world titles aplenty will be on the line across the elite, U23, junior, para triathlon and age group levels.
In this article, we will bring the history of the elite WTCS Finals to the foreground. To start with, we will survey the top performers from the previous fourteen instalments. Then we will turn to the present, covering the personal histories of this year’s world title hopefuls, the trend that may swing the men’s race, and the single statistic that may have to be broken to win the 2024 WTCS.
The record book
One athlete in particular was the face of the WTCS Finals in the early years. Alistair Brownlee holds the record for most wins, with his victories coming in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2014. Flora Duffy inherited the mantle of dominance and has claimed the most wins at the Series Finals, with her gold medals coming in 2016, 2017 and 2022. At the time of writing, no one else has won more than twice at a Final.
Then there are the different ways of winning. Last year, Dorian Coninx matched Kristian Blummenfelt’s 2021 record of the narrowest winning margin at a Final: a whole 0 seconds. At the other end of the spectrum, Emma Snowsill holds the record of the greatest winning margin at a Final. She soared to a spectacular victory in 2010, leading the way by 1min 42sec. Close battles have been a theme in the men’s events as 7 of the 14 editions have been won by less than 5 seconds. Alistair Brownlee actually holds the largest male margin of victory at 20 seconds from 2010. The story in the women’s field has been a little more variable. On 3 occasions, a woman has won by 5 seconds or less but on 3 further occasions a female athlete has won by over a minute. Ashleigh Gentle earned the tightest female Finals win on record with her victory by 2 seconds on home soil in 2018.
Shifting the lens to medals of any colour, Duffy and Gwen Jorgensen each have 4 apiece. Jorgensen, twice a winner and twice a silver medallist at the Finals, will be racing in Torremolinos this weekend and so has the chance to take the medals record outright. Javier Gomez Noya and Mario Mola, who won 7 WTCS titles between 2010 and 2018, have been the leading medallists at Finals. The Spanish duo have taken 6 medals over the years.
In addition, some athletes have been staples of the Finals for over a decade. Jonathan Brownlee, Richard Murray and Joao Silva have made 11 starts at the Finals, although they will not be adding to their record total this week. Juri Ide and Ai Ueda have also made 11 starts at the WTCS Finals. Again, they will not be adding to their totals in Torremolinos. At the same time, three athletes will be joining the “11 start club” in Torremolinos: Alice Betto, Yuko Takahashi and Rachel Klamer.
The 2024 challengers
We now turn to a more personalised approach to the history of the Finals; namely, the individual records of the quartet of male and female athletes that could win this year’s world title. The standalone 2020 world championships have been excluded as they were not a full WTCS Final and it was a strange season for obvious reasons.
The men’s frontrunner, Alex Yee, has yet to make the podium at a Final. He finished 13th in 2019, 11th in 2021, and then 4th in 2022 when lost the world title in a sprint finish with Jelle Geens. The following year, Yee placed 30th in Pontevedra and consequently fell from 1st to 5th in the overall Series standings. The Paris Olympic champion thus has a point to prove when it comes to the WTCS Finals.
On the other hand, Leo Bergere has been a hugely consistent force in recent Finals. Ranked 2nd currently in the Series, he finished 12th in 2019 and then really elevated his level. He placed 3rd in 2021 after having a chance to win in the sprint finish, won the race in 2022 to storm to the world title, and then finished 4th in 2023 after being in with a late chance to win again. Based on the past three years, if there is one man that will likely be in with a shout of winning, it will be Bergere.
Hayden Wilde is in a similar boat to Yee as he pursues a maiden medal at the Finals. He finished 25th in 2019, 14th in 2021, 6th in 2022 and then 10th in 2023. Matthew Hauser finished 5th at his Finals debut in 2022, notably passing Wilde in the late stages and therefore depriving him of the world title. The Australian athlete then placed 8th in Pontevedra after battling back from a bout of COVID in the weeks prior.
Turning to the women’s Series, Cassandre Beaugrand enters as the favourite and has progressed over each of her three Finals appearances. She took 17th place in 2019 before rising to 10th at her next outing in 2022. Last year, she claimed the bronze medal in Pontevedra.
Beth Potter, the 2023 world champion, first raced at the Finals in 2019 as well; a quirk of this year’s Series is that none of the leading four contenders among the men and women raced at a WTCS Final before the Lausanne event. Potter finished 28th in 2019 and rose to 18th in 2021. It was not her day in 2022 as she took 32nd place but a year later she won the race in style.
The next two female contenders, Lisa Tertsch and Emma Lombardi, are even newer to the Finals. They made their first starts in 2022 to contrasting fortunes. Tertsch finished 43rd in Abu Dhabi while Lombardi placed 8th. A year later in Pontevedra, though, Tertsch rocketed up to 4th while Lombardi took 6th place. Experience and medal history are therefore in Beaugrand and Potter’s favour but as young and rapidly rising athletes Tertsch and Lombardi will be pushing for a first Finals medal this week.
The non-golden golden trend?
On paper, it would make sense for the WTCS Final to be a coronation of sorts, the moment at which the world champion is crowned as the best triathlete in the world. However, the men’s field has traded this approach in favour of an altogether more dramatic method.
While shock winners may not be the correct term to use here, it has nonetheless become the norm for male winners of the Series Final to triumph without taking a win in the WTCS in the same campaign. The modern trend started in 2016 with Henri Schoeman winning the Final in Cozumel. Vincent Luis in 2017 and 2018 and then Blummenfelt in 2019 continued the pattern. Like Schoeman in 2016, Blummenfelt’s 2019 victory was his first ever gold in the WTCS. Blummenfelt then broke trend in 2021 as he also came out on top in Yokohama that same year. However, the trend struck back through Bergere in 2022 and Coninx in 2023.
Prior to 2016, Gomez’s 2012 victory was the only instance of a man winning the Series Final without a previous win in the same WTCS season. This was in no small part a result of the era of Brownlee-Gomez dominance as the pair were the only men to win Finals between 2009 and 2014 and generally hoarded WTCS wins as if they were diamonds. Still, the lesson of the modern men’s Series is that a new face may just pop up at the top of the podium. Of the world title contenders, Bergere and Wilde will likely take succour from this having not yet won a WTCS race this year.
In the women’s Series, there have only been three occasions in which an athlete has won the Final without a WTCS gold medal in the same year: Snowsill in 2010, Anne Haug in 2012, and Gentle in 2018.
The cutting edge?
Mario Mola’s run split of 28:59 in Chicago in 2015 remains the fastest ever run split at a WTCS Final. Mola was also the first man to dip under the 29 minute barrier in a Final. Meanwhile, Flora Duffy’s effort of 32:27 in Abu Dhabi in 2022 stands as the best ever female run at a Final.
While the record splits may not necessarily be on the athletes’ minds in the heat of battle, there is every chance that the hunt for the world title pushes the 2024 contenders past the current benchmarks. After all, Yee and Wilde have proven their chops on multiple occasions and hold the fastest ever standard distance run splits in WTCS history. Moreover, Hauser and Beaugrand reset the WTCS sprint distance run records in Hamburg earlier this summer. For any of the current crop of challengers to come out on top, then, it may take speeds faster than we have ever seen before.
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