West finishes the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in Taupo, New Zealand. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

Jason West was a big enough name in the world of multisport at the beginning of 2023 – from 2019 to 2022 he’d won five IRONMAN 70.3 races. In 2023, though, West didn’t just add a another 70.3 win to his resume (along with a win at Clash Miami), he proved that he could compete with the world’s best thanks to a runner-up finish to Leo Bergere in Oceanside, a runner-up finish to Jan Frodeno (just 28 seconds down from the German) at the PTO US Open, and a third-place finish at the PTO Asian Open in Singapore.

Renowned as one of the sport’s premier runners – he sits atop the PTO run rankings – West appeared ready to continue his steady move towards the elite levels of long-distance racing at the beginning of 2024. The 2015 national collegiate champion (he did a kinesiology degree at Penn State) truly turned his sights from making it to the Olympics to focusing on long-course during the pandemic, and his 2023 season seemed to foreshadow his chance to achieve his dream of winning the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship. Unfortunately, he ended up getting sick in the days before the race in Lahti, Finland, one of the few disappointments in his otherwise successful year of racing.

He rolled into 2024 sitting third in the PTO World Rankings and armed with a T100 contract, but found himself struggling for much of the first half of the year as he dealt with tendon issues around his pelvis.

“The first six or seven months of the year, I was probably in pain everyday,” West said in an interview a few days before the worlds in Taupo. Heading into the T100 races while injured wasn’t exactly the best way to take on the world’s best triathletes.

“Racing the T100 series, every single race felt like a world championship field,” West continued. “These big races where everybody is there, you can have a good day and come 10th … I’ve had performances this year that would’ve won most of the races in my career … and I’d be back in like eighth or 10th place. I think at some of the lower level races, there’s lots of points throughout the race that just aren’t that hard. There are some parts that might be tough, but the swims are generally not as hard, and there’s times on the bike where you’re not pushing that hard. But these races, you’re just full gas the whole way and that’s the norm.”

After trying to hold things together for months, West was finally forced to take some time off of running to try and get over the injury. Since he had a big break through August and September, instead of feeling like he needed a rest at the end of the season, West felt like he was just getting going as he went into the 70.3 worlds in Taupo. He arrived in New Zealand after a solid fifth-place finish at T100 Lake Las Vegas, but then had a tougher day at T100 Dubai, where he finished 13th.

Instead of getting that decent performance he was hoping for at the 70.3 worlds, the day ended up “summing up (his) year,” as he posted on Instagram. He was a bit behind where he’d hoped after the swim, then got dropped by the big group he was with on the bike, only to get passed by another group towards the end of the ride and getting a drafting penalty when they came around, setting the stage for a disappointing 28th-place finish.

Renewed Focus

Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

The tough year of racing in 2024 forced West to evaluate his approach to the sport.

“You take lessons from both sides of it,” he said. “When things go well, it’s also important to look at what was I doing that led me to have things go well. Or, if things haven’t gone well this year, what did I change or what was different in my life? It also gives you a little bit more perspective of what you want, what you don’t want. When you’re winning and you’re on top of the world, it probably masks a lot of things and you’re like, everything is just great. But when things start going wrong, you look to figure out why. I think it’s made me take a step back and just focus on what’s important, and how I want to do the sport. Not just going after specific goals, or I have to win this race, or that series, or something like that. It certainly made me think about how I want do it, what I want to get out of it and, maybe just making some changes for longevity and things like that.”

West’s answers to those questions? He’s determined to keep pushing himself, ensure he is enjoying the sport, and make some changes for 2025, including doing the “year totally different and thinking about what excites me and what’s fun.”

That process starts with this weekend’s IRONMAN 70.3 Pucon. Whether or not that will be the first stop on a season focused on the IRONMAN Pro Series is very much up in the air. West acknowledges that a full-distance race is in his future, but whether or not it will come this year remains to be seen.

“It’s something that I know I want to do eventually,” he said. “It’s such a big part of the sport. The pinnacle really is the Ironman World Championship. I mean, it’s the first triathlon I ever saw on TV, and know that I want to do that eventually. It’s just that I want to respect the distance, respect the race and respect what my competitors are doing. So I know that I can’t just hop in one and expect it to go well. I need to put in the appropriate training and really prepare.”

Partners

The upside of West’s breakthrough year was he was able to sign a number of excellent partnerships, many of which will run through the end of 2025. West was careful to think through what he was doing on the sponsor front during 2023, and enlisted the help of former pro Alicia Kaye to manage those partnerships.

“I feel like I have an incredible team around me and that’s become even more obvious as I’ve had a difficult year and they’ve all just been so supportive, and there’s a lot of belief in me,” he said. “So it feels like I have a super-good team around me that’s gonna be there to enjoy the highs, but also to continue to encourage me through the tough times.”

His only changes for 2025 on the sponsorship front is he’s signed with Goodlife Nutrition.

adding to his previous deal with Goodlife Brands, and replacing his previous nutrition sponsor.

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A post shared by Jason West (@jasonwesttri)

“I’ve really been able to build a team around me that’s focused on performance,” West continued. “That’s from Ventum helping me with a new bike, my position, and what equipment to run, or JACKROO trying to get the fastest fabrics and doing a custom suit. Every brand we have is playing a specific role and helping me create the ultimate performance.”

New Arrival

There is one other big change coming for West in 2025 – he and his wife Jessica have announced that they will be expecting a new addition to the family.

“I’m excited to be a dad and it just gives you a different perspective on life and a different purpose,” West said. “I’m not going to be able to wake up and drag along ’cause all I have to do is my training. I’m going to have other things that I have to do. And I think that’s gonna be really awesome. Ultimately, this is the most important thing, being a dad, and it’s just really exciting. It’s something I’ve looked forward to for a long time and now it felt like the time was right.”

While congrats might be in order, there’s some time before training days will be oriented around parenting. First up for 2025 is Sunday’s race in Pucon, where West arrives as one of the pre-race favorites. You can see the full pro list here.

The post Jason West Resets for 2025 first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

The IRONMAN Pro Series awards ceremony with Jackie Hering, Kat Matthews and Lotte Wilms. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

You’d be smiling, too, if you had just won yourself a nice US$200,000 bonus for winning the IRONMAN Pro Series. We were on hand as Kat Matthews was handed that big check after a stellar season that included a runner-up finish at both the IRONMAN World Championship in Nice and the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in Taupo. That bonus helped Matthews to earn a total of $549,000 last year, “the best earning season of any of the years I have looked at,” wrote Thorsten Radde, the man behind TriRating.com, who posted his annual year-end prize money ranking on Dec. 31.

It hardly comes as a surprise, then, that during an interview last week he was quick to agree with me that there’s never been a better time to be a pro triathlete.

“Oh, totally,” Radde said. “And, to me, Kat (Matthews) is an example. Martin Van Riel is an example. The amount of money that’s available in the middle distance, it’s never been better before. And, overall, it’s never been better before.”

Matthews finished just ahead of Taylor Knibb on the prize money ranking ($549,000 to $517,300), with Knibb earning the lion’s share of her prize money through the PTO – $410,000 from her four series wins and the overall T100 title. Van Riel, the winner of the men’s T100 series, took home $401,000 from the PTO, earning an additional $9,500 from World Triathlon and $2,500 from Ironman to take home a total of $413,000. Ashleigh Gentle was fourth in the overall standings with $354,427, while Kyle Smith rounded out the top five with $326,848.

Radde, who also consults with the Professional Triathletes Organisation (PTO) and has been a key player in the development of the ranking system used by the PTO, points out that the T100 Triathlon World Tour and the IRONMAN Pro Series “have created a significant addition of prize money into long-distance triathlon.”

That boost in prize money allowed 49 athletes to make over $100,000 last year, up from 29 athletes in 2023.

Ranking Systems

A win at IRONMAN 70.3 Western Australia helped Gregory Barnaby take the men’s IRONMAN Pro Series title. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

It should hardly come as a suprise that the man who has been so involved in the PTO ranking system, which takes into consideration the depth of field for each race along with the difficulty of the course, would not be as impressed with the considerably simpler IRONMAN Pro Series system. That Pro Series rankings start with a set number of points for the winner of each event – 5,000 for IRONMAN races, 2,500 for 70.3. (The world championship points start at 6,000 for the full and 3,000 for the 70.3.) The following athletes’ points decrease by a point for every second they are behind – hence the “every second counts” promo the Series has used. (You can read more about the points system here.)

“Obviously the PTO system is a lot more complicated than what IRONMAN has done,” Radde said. “To me it was too-simple a system, and I think it still is. But it’s been working well from a marketing viewpoint. That model of every second counts, and the simple way of being able to count down the points worked well.”

Radde also wasn’t a fan of having three full-distance races count because “it forces people to do a lot of racing if they want to do well.”

“But that’s a discussion that’s older than the Pro series,” he said with a laugh.

More Competitive Than Ever

Do the numbers back up the feeling that pro racing is more competitive than ever? Radde sure thinks so.

“I mean, you just have to go back to Kona Racing in 2010, or 2005,” he said. “You had a handful of people who would win it. And you could be reasonably certain that three of them would place on the podium. I don’t think we’re at that point anymore. You have easily 10 to 15 people who could contend for the podium, and the races are so close and so variable in how they develop. We’ve got the deepest fields, we’ve got the closest races.”

Radde sites a chat with fellow German Frederik Funk as proof of just how competitive the races have become. Funk didn’t win any races in 2024, but felt like his fifth-place performances at T100 London and T100 Ibiza were likely good enough to have won him a PTO event in 2022 or 2023.

It isn’t just the T100 races, either. Radde points to IRONMAN Cozumel, where Marten Van Riel made his full-distance debut.

“I guess in almost all instances five or 10 years ago, if he (Van Riel) crashes and loses some time, he would have been able to run himself back onto the podium,” Radde said. “But no longer. Even if there are names that you’ve never heard before, they’re still able to go super fast and do a sub-eight in their first Ironman, which was unheard of a couple years ago.” 

Short Course Racing

Cassandre Beaugrand competes in the mixed relay at the Olympics. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

Olympic champ Cassandre Beaugrand topped the short course prize money ranking this year, taking home $219,875 from World Triathlon and SuperTri. Hayden Wilde was second on that list ($198,575), although he augmented his earnings with IRONMAN events and earned $247,575 in total last year. Like Beaugrand, the men’s Olympic champ, Alex Yee, earned all his money through short course racing and ended up third on the list at $162,889.

One last stat we’ll throw at you from Radde’s reporting: “The total number of athletes who earned prize money has been almost unchanged (818 in 2023 vs 823 in 2024).”

The post It’s Never Been a Better Time to Be a Pro Triathlete … And the Numbers Prove It first appeared on Slowtwitch News.