By Kent Gray/Triathlon.kiwi in Hamburg
Ainsley Thorpe ticked the top box on her pre-Olympic Games ‘to do’ list to emerge the happiest of the five Kiwis on the opening day of the 2024 World Triathlon Sprint & Relay Championships in Hamburg overnight.
A season best swim-bike combo and hang tough run helped propel the 26-year-old Aucklander to 18th place in the individual women’s race won convincingly, for a second successive year, by Cassandre Beaugrand.
The Frenchwoman gapped her rivals on the first lap of the run to also claim her second straight WTCS win, from German Lisa Tertsch and Brit Beth Potter.
More importantly, Beaugrand’s second world title was a pre-Paris statement, in similar vein to Aussie Matt Hauser’s classy triumph over Vasco Vilaca (Portugal) and Pierre Le Corre (France) in the earlier men’s race where Kiwis Tayler Reid and Saxon Morgan finished 18th and 29th respectively.
Thorpe will take a huge confidence shot into her second Olympiad after finishing 1min 16sec adrift of Beaugrand but nine places and 39 seconds clear of Nicole van der Kaay in 27th. After another challenging swim, van der Kaay had to dig deep on the run to haul in young NZL team-mate and Paris reserve Brea Roderick who was a hugely respectable 29th after again mixing it with the big guns in the water and on the bike.
Thorpe’s performance was just a place shy of her equal best WTCS results – 17th in Abu Dhabi and at the Paris Olympic Test event last year – and has her in a good space eyeing Paris where she hopes to bury the demons of Tokyo 2020/21 when she crashed out of her Olympic debut.
Most pleasing in Hamburg was a much-improved swim compared to her efforts en-route to 22nd and 32nd places in this season’s two previous WTCS starts.
Thorpe was 17th out of the water in Hamburg in 10:04, on the feet of Beaugrand and Potter, and a mere 13 seconds adrift of the pace-setter, Austrian Therese Feuersinger.
At WTCS Yokohama and WTCS Cagliari, admittedly over the longer standard distance of 1500m, Thorpe had found herself fighting back from much tougher 51 and 57 second deficits respectively.
“My swim was so much better than Yokohama and Cagliari and that was my only goal today,” Thorpe said shortly after knocking out a 16min 39sec split for the closing 4.91km run.
“I know my running is the best it’s ever been, so, yeah, today was more a swim-bike focus and if I had tired legs on the run, then so be it. And that’s kinda what happened.
“My aim was just to nail that first part of the race and I did that today.”
If there was any slight disappointment it was a relatively slow T1 where Thorpe got caught up in a bevy of bikes and hurried humans.
“It was a bit congested coming back in, but I was well positioned and probably just needed to run transition that little bit harder, and that bike could have been a whole lot easier,” Thorpe said
“I just missed the train of girls to get up to those front guys [bunch on the bike] and the bike course was pretty hard, it was full on, the whole time.
“We were lucky that we had a couple of strong riders and we managed to bridge up with two laps to go which was epic because that’s my first coming off in the front pack this year at WTCS level.
“The last month was just working on that, and I’m so glad to have nailed that 2½ weeks out from the Olympics.”
Thorpe mopped a bloody bottom lip as she dissected her race, the result of a bump in the swim.
“I had a really good start. I think I was swimming next to Beth Potter the whole way and I was like, if I’m swimming with Beth Potter, I know I’m going be alright, she’s world champion.”
Roderick was the first Kiwi out of the water in an impressive 09:59 – just nine seconds adrift of Feuersinger – and perhaps paid for her hard riding in the front bunch with a 17:30 run.
But at just 22, this was the Cantabrian’s third best WTCS result. She wasn’t happy with her finish but can rest easy in the knowledge her run will come with age and more racing k’s / race craft under her belt.
For van der Kaay, a 16:17 run was the 14th fastest 4.91km split of the day. The trick, as she knows, is not leaving herself so much to do out of the water. There were only 13 slower swims than van der Kaay’s 10:23 split to survey on the final results sheet, frustrating given how hard she has worked on the discipline.
The Taupo 27-year-old doesn’t have to wait long for her next chance to make a splash as she is set to join Thorpe, Reid and Paris Olympics debutant Dylan McCullough in Sunday’s Mixed Relay (1am Monday NZT).
New Zealand were second in the World Triathlon Relay Championships 12 months ago but will be without Hayden Wilde this time as the Kiwi No.1 continues his Paris build-up at altitude in Andorra.
