What we learnt at the Paris Olympics triathlon test events

Thursday 17 August, 6:30am. We’re pedalling an e-bike over Pont de l’Alma, the next bridge along the Seine from des Invalides and Alexandre III. The sun is slowly rising behind the latter, so that the golden cherubs, nymphs and winged horses towering above either end of Paris’s most opulent bridge appear to be ablaze. We spin round and there’s the Eiffel Tower.

Paris at this time of day radiates a quiet solemnity. It knows it’s gorgeous, it’s simply waiting for the sun’s rays to show off its best side.

How bloody brilliant triathlon gets the chance to do the same, we think, as we quicken our cadence and bike further into the best setting for a tri we’ve ever seen.

Pont des Invalides marks the entrance to the venue, and it’s also the crossing the athletes will run and bike over as they check out the Olympic and Paralympic courses for the first time over the next four days.

The beautifully ornate Alexandre III provides the money shot, though; the iconic blue carpet runs its length and it’s the staging for not only both transitions but also the finish line. Sorry London 2012, you’ve just been upstaged.

But less of the fawning and more of the facts. Below we’ve put together 10 key takeaways from the four test races – the men’s and women’s individual, the paratriathlon and the mixed team relay – and what we can expect at this year’s main events…

1. Paris is the perfect backdrop for a triathlon

Like London, the French capital is replete with iconic monuments, buildings and roads, with the visual media having a field day trying to get as many of them into the same shot as was humanly possible.

So much so that some on social media complained that the coverage on triathlonlive.tv was starting to play more like a travel show than a race. But then with such a monotonous bike leg (see No.2), you can hardly blame the broadcasters.

What’s more, there was the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. A visual treat for cycling fans worldwide and a bucket-list moment for every single triathlete and paratriathlete who pedalled up those hallowed cobbles.

In all our post-race athlete interviews, the chance to ride along such a sporting landmark was top of their highlights list, with many admitting to having to fight back tears as they put rubber to the sacred rue.

GB’s Kate Waugh was one: “Part of me was like, ‘Oh my god I’m on the Champs-Élysées’, then I was like, ‘Kate, no, focus.’”

It’s a real shame then that the BBC missed all this, our national broadcaster deciding not to buy the rights from World Triathlon to complement its 2023 World Triathlon Championship Series (WTCS) coverage. What a mistake-a!

2. The bike course lacks technicality

As avid triathlon fans, you’ll know what we really mean here is that the individual bike-leg sections were boring and processional.

The 40km section is flat, with some pretty long stretches, but it lacks the punchiness required to have any chance of athletes forming a breakaway – the twists an audience likes to see to help sustain attention.

If that doesn’t happen, it’s only a matter of seconds before the scrolling on the smartphone starts, with the occasional glance up to see who’s actually doing any work, and – what you’re more likely to be checking on – if anyone’s fallen off.

In the men’s race, it took until just halfway through lap three of seven for 55 of the 65 men who started to come together to form one, large gargantuan pack.

So slow was the group at one point that the only stretching out going on was from the athletes at the back of the peloton trying to ease up their (equally as bored) muscles.

Inevitably, this meant the final results were going to be decided by a run, a criticism that’s been levelled at Olympic-distance racing for many years now and why there are hints we could see a switch to sprints post-Paris 2024.

Last year’s seven-race World Triathlon Championship Series, for example, featured just three standard-distance courses (Yokohama, Cagliari, and the Grand Final in Pontevedra, Spain). Still, Paris looked great.

3. It’s a runner’s course

Leaving the race to come down to the run benefits, you guessed it, the strongest runners. Luckily for us, two of the fastest racing at present happen to be Brits – Alex Yee and Beth Potter, both of whom won their respective races.

Potter’s power also helped secure silver on the final leg for Team GB in the Mixed Team Relay Test Event on the Sunday.

In Yee’s case, it was almost an embarrassing win, having enough time in hand to walk across the line and have a quick stroll around before the noise levels of the crowd alerted him to the fact that a sprint for the final two medals was happening behind him.

(Portugal’s Vasco Vilaça broke a thousand French hearts as he tore through the Tricolore trio of Léo Bergere, Pierre Le Corre and Dorian Coninx to pip the latter to silver.)

So, as long as you’re still awake after the bike leg, you could be rewarded for your efforts with some crowd-pleasing sprint finishes.

Who can forget the photo-finish sprint for gold between Nicola Spirig and Lisa Norden in Hyde Park, 2012? Bronze-medallist Erin Densham only realising that Spirig had been deemed the winner when all three were lining up for the medal ceremony!

4. Paris 2024 could be a duathlon

Ah, the swim. Over four days we listened to beaucoup de French civil servants talking about the water quality of the Seine.

Or at least it was about its quality for the first two days before a few questionable tests switched the narrative and suddenly the paratriathlon and the mixed relays were being reformatted as duathlons – “but it was just a precaution,” we were told.

Of course there was disappointment among the athletes, but all graciously acknowledged that this is what a test event is all about, and that Paris does have another 11 months to clean up its waterways.

We’ve since heard rumours – and they are just that, as no one will go on record – of several athletes getting sick following the individual races.

So, what would a duathlon look like? Well, it could make things very interesting. But again, is it more likely to play into the hands of the strong runners? Not necessarily, as even top pavement pounder Yee admitted after the mixed relay: “Duathlon’s flipping hard.” Teammate Waugh concurred with “yeah, it’s pretty savage.”

Another strong theme running through the mixed zone was how proud everyone was with how they adapted to the format change.

“We’re not really suited to a duathlon,” admitted GB’s PTVI athlete Oscar Kelly, racing with guide Charlie Harding. “But if we can do that well here [they finished fourth] then hopefully we can get a podium next year.”

But in reality, we’ll be very surprised if there is a duathlon in 2024.

5. Team GB has some strong up-and-comers

Okay, so this one we already knew, but Paris gave Barclay Izzard and Waugh their biggest stage to date – or at least certainly the one with the strongest fields – to showcase their emerging multisport talent.

With Yee already booked for 2024, and Jonny Brownlee still hoping to fill the (already qualified) second men’s slot of three for Team GB, Izzard’s been quietly racking up some pretty consistent top-20 WTCS results (17th in Paris) in a bid to secure that elusive third spot for Team GB’s men – one that wasn’t filled in Tokyo. Will he be the one to fill it, though?

Izzard ended the 2023 season in 30th place in the World Series rankings and 44th in the Olympic rankings, both higher placings than Brownlee. Izzard, who was a last-minute call-up in Paris, has also helped steer Team GB to three mixed relay silvers, one notably in Paris.

Last year’s U23 world champion Waugh was also part of that team. The 24-year-old from Gateshead had finished seventh in the individual race three days earlier, another excellent top-10 result to add to her best-finishing position of fifth in Yokohama back in May.

Waugh faces a tougher struggle than Izzard to make the team, however, as there now only two spots left (Potter secured the first at the Grand Final in Pontevedra). Other contenders for the final places include Sophie Coldwell (fifth in the 2023 WTCS rankings); reigning Olympic silver medallist Georgia Taylor-Brown (currently out injured); and Tokyo mixed team relay gold medallist Jess Learmonth, who welcomed her first child in September 2023 and is keen to pursue Olympic qualification.

Waugh might have to wait until LA 2028, but whatever the final team decision come next summer, we’ll be watching both Waugh and Izzard’s careers closely.

6. The Olympic qualification process is still very complicated

So who has actually secured their spot at Paris 2024? Not as many as you might think, as each federation’s selection criteria is different, with varying degrees of difficulty depending on said criteria.

Team GB’s, for example, dictated that any Tokyo individual medallist needed to medal at the Test Event or the Grand Final in order to automatically qualify for next year’s Games.

With silver-medallist Taylor-Brown on the sidelines, that meant only fellow runner-up Yee could tick the box at the Test Event, which he did, comfortably.

Potter, meanwhile, had the slightly harder task of needing to medal in both Paris and the Grand Final in order to book her slot. Two golds later, and a world title to boot, job done.

France and Germany required a podium finish at the Test Event, so Cassandre Beaugrand (silver), Laura Lindemann (bronze) and Coninx (bronze) are all set.

But not even a silver in Paris was enough for Portugal, poor Vilaça needing to podium overall in the 2023 WTCS (he finished fourth) in order to get his first-ever Olympics start.

Worryingly for the women’s field, mistress-of-all-distances Taylor Knibb also met the USA’s criteria – a podium or the first athlete home in the top eight. She finished fifth, two weeks after winning the PTO US Open and a week before retaining her 70.3 world title.

Morgan Pearson’s sixth place means he’ll also be joining his fellow Tokyo mixed relay silver medallist on the Parisian start line.

Reigning champion Kristian Blummenfelt, meanwhile, finished ninth, which he understandably wasn’t best pleased with as it’s Kristian, and nothing short of gold will suffice. He was back on form less than 48hrs later in Singapore, though, when he won the PTO Asian Open.

As for the Olympics, while he didn’t meet Norway’s inextricably complicated criteria, his presence in Paris is practically guaranteed as he won Tokyo and is the top Norwegian in the Olympic rankings.

And let’s not forget the absentees – notably Taylor-Brown and Tokyo champ Flora Duffy, who had been on the start list but DNS’d due to ongoing injury. If fully fit, don’t rule either of them out to repeat their Tokyo success come next July.

7. The crowds will be numerous and noisy

The throngs in London in 2012 are now legendary, with people standing 10-deep in some parts as they cheered on the Brownlee brothers to gold and bronze.

Four years later and Rio was raucous but didn’t attract quite the same numbers – aided greatly in 2012, of course, by those two homegrown heroes – while Tokyo’s crowd was nonexistent, thanks to the pandemic.

Those Hyde Park figures – some believe close to a million watched it live around the course – could be surpassed in Paris. As in London, the triathlon will be one of several free-to-watch Olympic sports, allowing spectators to line the route from almost start to finish.

In London, the home crowd had three potential medallists racing – the Brownlees and Helen Jenkins (who finished fifth). For the French, they could very well have six.

Fighting to join 2023 world champion Coninx and Le Corre (the latter qualified after finishing third in the Grand Final) are Bergere and Vincent Luis. Luis, sadly, had to DNF in Paris due to an ongoing injury.

For the women, Beaugrand is most likely going to be joined by Emma Lombardi and Léonie Périault. All visited one or more WTCS podiums in 2023.

The Brownlees still credit that London 2012 crowd for giving them some extra speed, and while the Test Event crowd couldn’t quite deliver the French athletes to the top step, another year to swell the ranks and who knows what that fierce French pride could achieve. Vive la France!

8. Paratri might finally get the stage it deserves

Paratriathlon was welcomed into the Paralympic family for Rio 2016 to much justified fanfare. It was a heartbreaking shame then to see the event scaled back due to some woeful accounting by Rio’s organisers.

Five years later and the paratriathletes were further denied the full Paralympic experience in Tokyo – as were the Olympians, of course.

Fast-forward to the Paris Test Event and their swim’s being cancelled due to the aforementioned suspect Seine water (the Tokyo Paralympic Test Event suffered the same fate in 2019), and they experience the only rain in an otherwise cloudless four days of racing.

Of course, that can all be put down to a run of bad luck, and it sure as heck didn’t deter the exuberant crowds in Paris, transfixed as they were watching the six different paratri categories compete simultaneously in a paraduathlon.

Paris 2024 will include three more categories than Tokyo – men’s PTS2 (severe impairments) and PTS3 (significant impairments), and women’s PTS4 (moderate impairments) – when the Paralympics roll round at the end of August (paratriathlon will be contested over 1 and 2 September).

9. The mixed relay is still the best spectator event

Who saw Team Germany winning?! We didn’t and we were there. France had it in the bag, until they didn’t and finished fourth, with a heartbroken Emma Lombardi quietly dipping under the finishing gantry with a look that said, ‘No one saw that, right?’

All credit to her teammates, Coninx, Beaugrand and Bergere, though, who were there to console her and really tried their best to look like they meant it. But that’s the beauty of the mixed team relay, and why everyone was asking post-Tokyo, ‘Why wasn’t this included earlier?’

With Jonny Brownlee having a poor individual race (51st, 5mins down on Yee) – he also lost his beloved pet dog Barney the same week – up-and-comer Izzard was drafted in for the first leg for Team GB.

He handed over to the ever-improving Waugh, who, as we mentioned earlier, raced into a brilliant seventh in the individual race. Both great athletes in the making, but still on the inexperienced side compared to their teammates Potter and Yee.

But again, this is why the mixed relay is such an inspired event as it’s a fantastic training ground, (as is Super League; Waugh won her first SLT race two weeks after Paris before going on to claim the overall title in October).

There’s no other choice in this format but to race and think hard and fast, and, yet again, Paris provided the perfect platform for one of the most exciting developments to come out of tri in the last decade.

Team GB took silver, while an astonished yet elated Belgium capitalised on Lombardi’s tired legs to take bronze.

10. Hayden Wilde is a brilliant athlete and interviewee

Who else could fall off his bike en route to the venue before the biggest race of the year, damage his hip, decide to still give the race a go despite being in pain during the swim and when riding over the cobbles, before finally pulling the pin on the run… and then still give a pushy journalist the time of day to answer some questions with great humour and humility?

On his accident to the course, Hayden Wilde replied: “Yeah I decided to kiss the pavement, I like to keep things spicy.” And on seeing him roll on to the ground mid-run: “I just decided I wanted a lie down… s**t happens.”

Top image credit: Tommy Zaferes/World Triathlon