Kevin: Ryan, in addition to your thoughts, let’s bring Eric Wynn into the discussion, too – I think he has some very strong feelings on this subject.

I’m not sure if we need to have any specific parameters for this topic, other than it should be endurance sport oriented, and available in 2024. I don’t think said product necessarily needs to have been released in 2024, that way we can take into consideration products that might have been launched in 2023, but weren’t widely available until last year. 

Ryan: I think that makes sense – if a product “launched” in 2023 but was largely unavailable to the general public until 2024, I think that fits our criteria.

Kevin: To get started, here are a few products that caught my attention in 2024 that I would happily throw into the mix: 

There were a few bike launches that caught my attention last year. Cervelo’s new P5 is a great ride, and innovative in a particularly “Cervelo way” – the big changes were around comfort and adjustability. The new P-Series was probably more of a breakthrough – it really is all the bike most triathletes could ever need for a lot less money. In that vein, Argon 18’s new E117 was another mid-range bike that offered a ton of high-end features. You can add Factor’s new Slick and Van Rysel’s new XCR to that “lot of bike for the money” group. My guess is that none of these will fit the bill as our award winner – the bike world seems to move in such tiny increments these days. 

One product that was released in 2023 that remained almost impossible to find for much of 2024 was Profile Design’s 43 ASC Carbon Extensions. (The company added the 52 ASC last year that offers an “increased grip angle.”) For $300 you got the extra support and aero features seen in bars with a much, much higher price tag, which is no-doubt why they were in such demand. A more affordable way to get into the world of the aero-cockpit was hugely appreciated by many in the sport.

On the electronics front, there’s been a lot going on over the last few years. The Apple Watch Ultra has been a game changer for many, allowing serious triathletes to track their training with a smartwatch that does all they want on that front. There were no changes to the Ultra last year, but the new Apple Watch Series 10 offers almost all the same features for half the price, making it a viable option for triathletes who aren’t gearing up for a full-distance race. I haven’t had a chance to play with Garmin’s Fenix 8, but that AMOLED screen with decent battery life sure looks good.

I’ve purposely left out a few categories here, knowing full well that you’ll have some running shoe options to throw out, Ryan. Eric, I’ll let you throw your two-cents in, too!

Eric: I think the most important product of the year is FORM Swim 2.0.

As triathletes, what do we struggle with the most? Outside of the overall price tag of the sport of triathlon, it’s the swim. The swim is by far the biggest hurdle of the three disciplines we have when it comes to getting and keeping athletes in the sport. It’s the least natural thing for the masses to wrap their heads around. And it takes the most consistent effort to become and stay efficient in. It’s the biggest problem we see when it comes to safety in the sport.

What I love about the FORM goggles is that it’s the first product to truly help the newbie be able to manage some of the biggest hurdles they face in a consistent way without costing a lot of money. Some examples: 

#1 Measure stress and effort.

With heart rate and stroke count visible in the goggle display, athletes can now focus on effort at the start and during a race and for the first time really doing a race like they have trained. For years we have been able to do this on the bike and run. And it’s one of the main reasons why athletes are getting so much faster. They know what is going on with their body and they can match that effort on race day and know what limits they can push. Up until FORM came out, measuring that in the water just wasn’t really available to the masses in the way FORM has presented it, with a visual display for athletes to be able to calm themselves as they measure true effort within the swim. 

#2 Directional help aka swimming straight.

I’m sorry, but I don’t care who you are. You don’t always swim straight. We have seen everyone get lost or mess up a line on a swim at some point. Does that mean this device will make you perfect? No, but it will make your swim path better at a much less expended effort (AKA a lot less sighting required.) If I’m the average swimmer I can spend way less time focusing on lifting my head out of the water and focusing on stroke, heart rate and breathing. 

The masses worry about the swim the most. Race directors worry about the swim the most. Insurance companies care about the swim the most. FORM 2.0 is the biggest and most influential product in my opinion for 2024.

Ryan: Eric raises some really good points on the FORM 2.0, especially with the integration for open-water sighting.

That said, I think most innovation and impact happened in the run space over the past year. For me, it comes down to three potential products.

I’ll get the two running shoes out of the way first. I think ASICS and the MetaSpeed Sky Paris has done something that no other shoe has been able to do, which is supplant Nike as the shoe of choice for non-sponsored athletes. Having done a fair amount of testing in that shoe last year in my build-up to Lake Placid, it is shockingly quick for someone with a longer stride length. As I build back up into my running, that’s probably my default choice for a racing shoe. It’s everything you could want in a carbon racing shoe, and it’s selling extremely well.

The other shoe innovation comes from On, and it’s the Cloudboom Strike LS (seen above on Paula Findlay at 70.3 Worlds). Although the midsole and outsole construction are shared with the standard Strike, it’s the upper that sees all the innovation. It’s a single thread of filament, 1500 meters long, spun by a robot to turn it into a mesh-like upper. It’s both significantly lighter than a standard shoe upper, and it reduces carbon emissions during the build by 75% versus a standard upper. Considering the environmental impacts of our sport, generally, any kind of cut during product construction should be seen as a boon.

But I would argue that the greatest innovation came for indoor training, and that’s Wahoo’s KICKR Run treadmill. You first have the run free mode, where the treadmill senses your pace and adjusts the belt accordingly. No more playing around with the speed toggle for interval training; it’s just done. But then there’s the smart connectivity – whether it’s in Wahoo’s own ecosystem, Zwift, or others, the treadmill can be fully controlled for terrain or intervals. It brings the gamification benefit of indoor training apps to running, which has always been what hampers indoor run training.

In my opinion, being able to really unlock the gamification of indoor running for the millions of indoor training users is the biggest innovation of the year.

Voting is now open at the forum thread for this article.

The post 2024 Slowtwitch Awards: Product of the Year first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

To recap thus far, we’ve awarded the following:

Triathlete of the Year: Taylor Knibb

Long Course Athletes of the Year: Kat Matthews, Patrick Lange

Short Course Athlete of the Year: Cassandre Beaugrand

Ryan: To me, Kevin, this feels like it should be a two horse race between Alex Yee and Hayden Wilde. Kinda like the Olympics and WTCS season all over again.

Kevin: Yep, I do believe this is down to those two. I would love to add Léo Bergère to the discussion, but once again I feel like I’d just be throwing out a name then quickly setting myself up to discount it. (He was beaten by both the frontrunners at the Olympics, and finished behind Wilde for the overall supertri title, too.)

I think it’s hard not to put Alex Yee at the top of the list based on his Olympic win and then (finally) winning the world championship title. Granted, Wilde beat him at the Championship Final, but after two years of losing the world title thanks to a disastrous finals appearance, I think Yee’s one and only goal at that race was to not screw up. Yee also won when it most counted – he won every World Triathlon race he entered except the final. While he didn’t take the supertri title, Yee did manage two impressive wins in that series – taking both Boston and NEOM. (I captured this shot – and the one above – of the Boston finish – to me it pretty much expresses Yee’s dominance over Wilde when it counted the most.)

Supertri Boston. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

If we were to have an award for the year’s most exciting racer, it would have to go to Wilde. He certainly went for it all in Paris, setting up a truly classic race. He closed the season with a solid supertri season, and finally got the big day we’ve long expected at the World Triathlon Championship Final. While his Taupō performance doesn’t count on this front, he sure did help make that day an exciting one, too.

Am I missing something, Ryan? Is there a reason to give this award to Hayden Wilde that I am not seeing?

Wilde on the run at the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship. Photo: Kevin Mackinnon

Ryan: Yes, there is!

If we are looking line-by-line at their race results this year, you wind up seeing that Wilde and Yee split the supertri season against one another – they beat each other twice. But whereas Wilde was extremely competitive at all of the supertri events (his worst finish of the year was third in Toulouse), the same could not be said for Yee. He was 8th in Chicago, and 12th in London. Yee was never really in contention for the supertri standings crown.

Then when you factor in Wilde’s races with Yee in WTCS and the Olympics, it’s a much closer battle there than it was with supertri. Yes, Yee won more. But it’s not like Wilde was getting his doors blown off. And Wilde did, indeed, win the Grand Final, with a very sizable margin of victory.

I do put a bit of a premium on being able to showcase racecraft across multiple disciplines, even within our definitions of course length. Wilde did that more than anybody else last year.

Kevin: So, if I have this straight, Alex Yee, the Olympic and world champion, shouldn’t be our short course male athlete of the year because he had two “bad” supertri races and finished third at the World Triathlon Championship Finals? He beat Wilde in Cagliari. He beat Wilde in Paris, at the biggest draft-legal/ short course race of the year. He was well ahead of Wilde in Wehei (Wilde was 1:40 back there – further behind than Wilde was in Torremolinos), too. He also managed to beat Wilde at two of the five supertri races. To me, if you’re going to vote for Wilde, you’re saying that the supertri series means more in the big picture than the Olympics or the World Triathlon Championship Series. 

I get the added premium on Wilde doing so well at 70.3 worlds, and he also won the Laguna Phuket Triathlon, but I am not sure we should be counting those results when we’re handing out the short course athlete of the year.

Good grief … another vote? I thought I was going to be safe on this one, as with the women!

Ryan: Didn’t you know I went to law school? I can argue just about anything and make some type of reasonable case out of it…

I think, similarly to how we did the women’s calculus, it means we should weigh the supertri and WTCS season championships similarly. So the tiebreaker comes down to the Olympics. And, well, Yee beat Wilde, despite Wilde throwing everything he had at him.

Therefore, much to the happiness of a couple of our *ahem* vocal forum members, Alex Yee is our men’s Short Course Athlete of the Year.

Kevin: Great choice, Ryan. I do admire your ability to argue almost anything. And, while I’m not sure I’m willing to weigh supertri and WTCS equally, I’ll happily concur that Alex Yee is the right choice.

The post 2024 Slowtwitch Awards: Men’s Short Course Athlete of the Year first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Ryan: Alright, Kevin – let’s look at who had outstanding season’s for women. I suppose we should really start this with Cassandre Beaugrand, right? Ran the table for the World Triathlon Championship Series events she raced, plus the Olympic gold.

Kevin: Yep, I think this conversation pretty much starts and finishes with Cassandre. Olympic champ, world champ, won on the biggest stages when it mattered most. (And, as I am sure you’re sick of hearing me say … won gold despite the pressure of an entire country on her shoulders.)  

Ryan: I think we can make a realistic case for Beth Potter. She won the e-Tri World Championship in February and then finished no worse than third in any other World Triathlon race she participated in during 2024. That includes dueling bronze medals in Paris for the individual and mixed team relay events, and then a second place at the Grand Final.

Add it all up and World Triathlon has Potter ranked number one, not Beaugrand. Couple it with her contributions to the mixed team relay rankings (second in the world, versus France in eighth), and you could say, just based on those rankings, Potter deserves the title.

But I also think it’s really hard to overlook the dual crowns Beaugrand took in 2024. If it was just the Olympic Games victory, you could maybe write that off as a one-off. But earning both that and the WTCS title in the same year? And she’s not the world number one right now? That tells me World Triathlon has some work to do on their points system.

Kevin: Yeah, hard to imagine how you possibly put Potter ahead in our Triathlete of the Year ranking. I think the World Triathlon Points system takes into account results from the previous year, too, which is why Potter remains at the top, but when you look at 2024, there really wasn’t any way you could say she was better than Beaugrand. Sure, she won the E World Triathlon Championship in London, but after that it was all Cassandre (almost) all the time. As much as I applaud Potter’s incredible journey from Olympic 10,000 m runner in 2016 to Olympic bronze-medal triathlete, when it comes to Triathlete of the Year voting, she just didn’t have the results.

Beaugrand’s season was so good that it even negates bringing up Georgia Taylor-Brown’s third straight supertri title – she took that after finishing fourth in the final race in NEOM which was won by … Cassandre Beaugrand.

Does this one even require a vote?

Ryan: For the sake of argument, let’s talk Taylor-Brown (and supertri) for a minute, as it’s definitely relevant. She won three of four their races before heading to the final in Neom. She beat Beaugrand head to head three times in a row. And was a critical component of that GB bronze medal in mixed team relay. She was arguably just as dominant at supertri as Beaugrand was at WTCS racing.

But that’s just the respective series crowns. And Beaugrand still won Olympic gold on top of that.

Kevin: Totally happy to have that argument, for sure. Although, I now find it interesting that the mixed relay suddenly factors into your voting process when it didn’t with the overall Triathlete of the Year conversation!

Ryan: Don’t you start bringing logic into the conversation.

Kevin: OK, I’ll give you that …  

OK, back to the supertri/ Taylor-Brown argument … I had a great interview with Beaugrand before the Boston supertri event, and she basically said she was just happy to have made it there after the insane few weeks she’d had since the Olympics. She knew she wasn’t going to be truly competitive, but still hung in for eighth that day. A week later she was second in Chicago and finished second to Taylor-Brown again in London and Toulouse. Then she took the win in NEOM where Taylor-Brown was fourth. So it’s not as though Beaugrand wasn’t competitive on the supertri front. 

There’s also the format question. To me it’s like the clay court tennis swing, where some athletes really excel on that surface, but aren’t always in the mix to be considered the top athlete of the year. (I won’t stir things up by asking anyone here to weigh in on which is more important, Wimbledon or the French Open …) Supertri is definitely a unique format that suits Taylor-Brown perfectly. Until that format appears at the Olympics, though, I think I’d prefer to have enjoyed Cassandre Beaugrand’s season over GTB’s.

As with Potter, that’s not to take anything away from Taylor-Brown and her incredible journey back to the top echelons of the sport, but I just can’t see an argument for putting her at the top of the list. 

So, in the end, I think this one is pretty simple – Olympic gold and a world championship makes this one a pretty easy pick! 

Ryan: Agreed!

Kevin: Cassandre Beaugrand is our women’s Short Course Athlete of the Year.  

The post 2024 Slowtwitch Awards: Women’s Short Course Athlete of the Year first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

As a reminder, voting is still ongoing for the women’s ballot.

Ryan: We had a good spirited debate on the women’s nominations for this award. Let’s turn it over to the men. Who’s on your short list?

Kevin: Well, this should be fun. I am sure you will be shocked that I would put Patrick Lange on the list – while his year wasn’t super-consistent, he came through on the biggest stage in record-setting style. While he ended up short on the IRONMAN Pro Series title, he still finished second in that. As I mentioned earlier with the women – being an IRONMAN world champion in Germany is huge (yes, I know he lives in Austria, but that won’t affect anything on the sponsorship or appearance front). Taking a third Kona title puts him in some pretty rare company, and 7:35:53 … well, that just takes it all to another level, too. 

While I feel Magnus Ditlev deserves mention for his Roth performance and general consistency through the year, I really don’t think he can factor into the discussion as he didn’t get a world title or contend for the top of the podium in either the T100 standings of the IRONMAN Pro Series. 

I think you have to put Marten Van Riel in the equation (especially since we’ve decided T100 distance is “long”) – the guy won three T100 races and finished second in the other one he competed in. He also managed a seventh-place finish in Cozumel despite having to wait to file a police report after his accident. 

And then there is Jelle Geens. He ticks off the box of having won a world championship (Taupo) and was the only person to beat Van Riel in a T100 race this year (Lake Las Vegas). He was consistent in his other 70.3 appearances – second in Zell am See, third in Tallinn and fourth in Oceanside – and also managed another Olympic appearance (his third) before truly turning his sights to the long-distance stuff. 

Is there anyone you think I’m missing, Ryan?

Ryan: I think you have to put Gregory Barnaby in the discussion given the reasoning you have for eliminating Ditlev; winning the IM Pro Series has to count for something. Again, dueling top 10s at the two IRONMAN World Championships, plus three podiums on the year, counts for something.

But I also would put more weight on Ditlev’s season than you did, Kevin. Although he didn’t wind up contending in the season standings, it’s not like his results at T100 were lackluster. In four races he took a win, two fourths, and then an eighth at the finale – which came just a few weeks after his second place in Kona. 

This is probably controversial, but I think we might have to look at eliminating Lange from this. Yes, he’s the reigning IRONMAN World Champion. Yes, he also won IRONMAN Texas this year. But his 70.3 performances were abysmal by comparison. And I think we have to wind up giving more credit to athletes who are able to excel across the spectrum of what we’re calling long course. (No matter how important winning a world title is in Germany.) That logic also tends toward us eliminating Geens, despite the 70.3 world title.

So for me, this becomes a discussion of Van Riel, Ditlev, and Barnaby. Obviously Ditlev and Barnaby were both more successful at the full distance this year than Van Riel was. Van Riel’s got the world title in his pocket. Barnaby’s consistency got him a $200,000 bonus. And Ditlev was really strong at the two biggest full distance events in the world and had a solid run of T100 races.

I feel like now we have to get very nitpicky, Kevin.

Kevin: I hear you. And I agree that Gregory should be added to the mix, for sure. While I believe that we need to acknowledge his season, it seems crazy to me that we’d give him the Athlete of the Year award over guys who beat him at all the major races. The IRONMAN Pro Series rewards consistency, but are we ready to give the award to someone who was sixth at the IRONMAN World Championship and ninth at the 70.3 worlds? 

I would be happy to leave Magnus in the discussion, too, but remain reluctant to leave Patrick out of the equation. Maybe it’s the era I come from. Back when I was racing, Dave Scott won Kona more times than he didn’t, and often didn’t perform super-well at other races through the season. There was a reason his nickname was “The Man,” though – that ability to come through on the one day that really counted amounted to a lot. Patrick did that in style this year – his win didn’t just net him a world title, it put him in some very special company as one of the all-time Kona greats. The list of three-time Kona champs? Dave Scott, Mark Allen, Peter Reid, Craig Alexander, Jan Frodeno and now Patrick Lange. That, to me, is worth acknowledging.

Ryan: Here’s the thing I struggle with on Lange: yes, he won Kona. And he wound up earning the win in Texas, albeit a few months after the fact due to Tomas Rodriguez-Hernandez’s anti-doping sanction. But his record at 70.3 this year was atrocious – his best showing of the year was 16th place at Oceanside, more than 15 minutes behind winner Lionel Sanders. (Yes, forum readers, we’ve officially hit our Lionel quota for an article on men’s racing.)

And yes, to me, “of the year” by definition means we are looking at the entirety of the season, not just one race or performance. Just like a win in Kona or Nice or Roth carries a heavy weight, not being in the mix at another distance (or for a bunch of the year) should also carry a lot of weight. To me, Lange was so far behind in 70.3 events this year that it pulls the value of his two IM wins down.

Perhaps this all puts Ditlev’s season into further perspective – he was competitive every time he started, won the largest full distance race not named IRONMAN World Championships, and took second at IM Worlds (in the fifth fastest time ever in Kona). For as much as I like Barnaby, and that IM Pro Series consistency paid off in a healthy paycheck, I think Ditlev’s year probably outweighs it.

So to me it’s a Ditlev vs. Van Riel conversation. Ditlev was more successful at long course, and competitive at T100. Van Riel was near untouchable at T100 with a well deserved world title, and was on track for an excellent finish in Cozumel until that unfortunate collision. Results are results, though…

But I think we should put it to our readers at this point.

The post 2024 Slowtwitch Awards: Men’s Long Course Athlete of the Year first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

Note that there is no double-dipping at this. With Taylor Knibb winning the voting for Triathlete of the Year, she is ineligible for this award.

Ryan: First, Kevin, I think we probably need to set some parameters as to how we define Long Course, because I’m sure that will ruffle a few feathers.

Kevin: You think? While I don’t necessarily agree with this, I think the PTO has pushed us into a world where T100 and up is now considered long distance. (Which, I note, is hilarious for an organization that was started to help full-distance IRONMAN athletes make more of a living – but that’s fodder for a completely different story or even a podcast!)

Ryan: Yeah. It comes down to thinking that there’s no need to divide up and have a 70.3/T100 distance award – and with World Triathlon dubbing T100 “long course,” we’ll follow along.

Going into the potential nominees, I still think the same case can be made for Kat Matthews that I made for her Triathlete of the Year nomination. Nobody raced more, and across more distances, than she did, and made an absolute killing in bonuses from the IRONMAN Pro Series victory and finishing 4th in the T100 standings. But I think there’s strong arguments for the two women who beat her on some of the larger stages: Ashleigh Gentle and Laura Philipp.

Gentle’s year was similar to that of Matthews; she raced 7 times and was on the podium for 5 of them. Head-to-head, Gentle and Matthews raced 5 times together, with Gentle coming out ahead 3 out of 5 times, including at the T100 Grand Final in Dubai. And although it doesn’t count for the purposes of this award, Gentle also extended her unbelievable win streak in Noosa.

As for Philipp: obviously, she emerged over Matthews in that duel at the IRONMAN World Championships in Nice to take her first world title. She also had her strong second place in Roth. When you race nine times in a year, and your worst finishing position is 7th, that’s an awfully strong campaign. 

For me this comes down to Matthews and Philipp, and it’s not too dissimilar from the point I was trying to make for Triathlete of the Year: I think it’s important that you show the versatility of being able to race both T100/70.3 distance and 140.6. And that’s something that Gentle just has not done.

Kevin: For sure Kat needs to be considered the front-runner on this one. Some notes, though. There was one athlete who actually raced more than Kat last year – I did a profile on Els Visser yesterday. (I did note right off the bat in that piece that she wasn’t likely to be in the running for any Triathlete of the Year awards, but did enjoy a pretty spectacular season.) There’s another name I would add to the discussion – Anne Haug. If you asked me in July who was going to be the Triathlete of the Year, I would have been willing to bet it would be her. I was in Lanzarote when she broke Paula Newby Fraser’s long-standing course record, and wished I had made it to Roth to watch that otherworldly 8:02:38 performance. I truly couldn’t see any way she wasn’t going to win Nice at that point – I hope my beliefs didn’t jinx her.

Unfortunately, as amazing as those two performances were, the rest of the season wasn’t Triathlete of the Year worthy. (Yes, I am also asking myself why I even went down that road, but it just seemed weird not to have any mention of Haug in this mix!)

I agree on your Ashleigh Gentle points, Ryan. I don’t think she ends up ahead of either Kat or Laura based on her mostly T100, with a touch of 70.3 and a dash of Olympic-distance (Noosa) race season.  

Which leaves us with the Kat / Laura debate for this one. I do believe there is an argument for giving Laura Philipp the award here. As you pointed out, her two “worst” performances were the pair of seventh-place finishes at T100 Lake Las Vegas and T100 Dubai, both of which came after her incredible day in Nice. It’s impressive to me she even made it to those races. People in North America have no idea how big a deal it is to be an IRONMAN world champion over in Germany. The sponsor and media requirements for her after winning Nice must have been nuts. 

Philipp’s year was truly focussed on Nice, too. After the race she told me that she’d had it in her head that the race in Nice was her best shot at a world title from the day IRONMAN announced they would be heading there. So, I guess it comes down to what people think is most important when it comes to picking a Triathlete of the Year. Consistency? Being able to take the world title? A combination of the two?

Happy to hear any arguments, or simply send this to a vote!

Ryan: I think this one is awfully close. In my opinion, you have to give some additional weight to performing at both IRONMAN world championship races (and, for that matter, Dubai as well). But I suppose we can send it to a vote.

The post 2024 Slowtwitch Awards: Women’s Long Course Athlete of the Year first appeared on Slowtwitch News.

First up is the big prize: Triathlete of the Year.

Kevin: Well this one is easy. She won the T100 Triathlon World Tour. She took her third straight 70.3 world championship. She also put together an incredible sprint to get the Americans the silver medal in the mixed relay at the Olympics. (There were a bunch of other T100 wins, Oceanside 70.3 and the national TT championship, too.) On the “long-distance” triathlon front – I am anticipating we’ll have a good ol’ debate about that, too – she was unbeaten this year. I really can’t imagine how this can go to anyone other than Taylor Knibb.  

Ryan: I can go different than Taylor Knibb!

When I think of Triathlete of the Year, I think of remarkable consistency across the entirety of the year, regardless of what they were racing. Don’t get me wrong: Knibb’s run of success is remarkable. She’s unbeatable at 70.3/T100. But her individual results at Olympic distance events was lacking, outside of a single second place early in the year: 19th in Paris, 11th in Caligari, her last two races at that distance. I also don’t put too much stock in Mixed Team Relay results, especially when you had the early race collision between New Zealand and France.

So in my mind there’s another woman that comes to mind: Kat Matthews. Ten long course races in her year. Of her nine finishes, eight of them were fifth or better. Two wins and four seconds mark highlights, including her incredible dual silvers at IRONMAN and IRONMAN 70.3 World Championships. She managed to satisfy both T100 and IRONMAN Pro Series requirements, earning $275,000 in year end bonuses (on top of the prize money from her other finishes). 

So I think it really just comes down to how you define your parameters, Kevin.

Kevin: I 100 percent hear you that Kat’s year was incredible. I certainly acknowledged that in the story I did on her IRONMAN Pro Series win last week. I even acknowledged how impressive the year was considering the adversity she faced – torn calf in Miami, DQ in Hamburg. 

In terms of my parameters, normally a season like hers would get my vote. For me, though, the head-to-head competition has to be a factor when you’re handing out the “triathlete of the year.” Yes, Kat got to within 1:15 of Taylor in Taupo, but at no point was Taylor ever threatened in that race – you certainly got the feeling there was another gear there if it was needed. I won’t count the difference in any of the T100 fall races because Kat was still recovering from Nice, but you look back at T100 San Francisco and the gap was pretty close to four minutes. 

The other factor, for me, comes from Kat herself. At the post-race press conference in Taupo, she (and the rest of the women in attendance) acknowledged that Taylor was in a different league this year. Yes, I know they’re likely being professional and respectful (Kat Matthews, Ashleigh Gentle, Imogen Simmonds and Julie Derron are all class acts), but they all made it pretty clear that Taylor was a step above them over the half distance this year.

And I might be a bit biased since I was there watching the Paris Games, but it is really hard to discount Taylor’s performance there. Bouncing back from a brutal time in the Time Trial, and a tough day in the individual, she found another level to get the US up a spot on the podium. I get that France should have dominated that day, but that’s racing. You can only compete with the people who are there.

Back when I used to do this for Triathlon Magazine, one of our criteria for Triathlete of the Year was that the athlete had to have won a world championship or major event (Olympics) to be considered. Part of the logic for that idea was we wanted to celebrate an athlete who “rose to the occasion” – was able to come through on the big day. I feel like Kat even got that – in Taupo there was no thought of “playing it safe” to ensure she took the IRONMAN Pro Series – she was going for the win, plain and simple.

Ryan: I hate the logic that you must have won a world title for consideration for this. You don’t vote for the year-end most valuable player in other sports based on their performance in the playoffs or a series (there’s usually one specifically for those events). It’s off of what they did in the entirety of the year.

Knibb would be my immediate pick for another award that we have coming. Her dominance is undeniable at 70.3 right now. But by that logic of having won a world title, I think we’d then throw Cassandre Beaugrand into the mix for Triathlete of the Year. To take Olympic and WTCS gold in the same year, IMO, is a bigger deal than Knibb’s display at 70.3/T100. She swept WTCS events. She finished second at eSports worlds. And that dominating display on home soil for gold is something else.

Ultimately, though, that’s why I think Matthews winds up the pick; she didn’t just do it at one distance. She does it at 70.3/T100 and at full iron-distance events. From the hilliest of course in Nice to pancake flat ones in Texas, she’s at the front of the field.

This might need to come down to some run-off voting.

Kevin: I totally see where you are coming from, and we argued long and hard over that criteria. In the end, though, we were looking to acknowledge the people who came up big at the major events. It’s funny that you mentioned Cassandre Beaugrand – I was going to suggest that if there was anyone who could arguably win the award not named Taylor Knibb, it would be her. To have won the Olympics in front of a home crowd was an incredible performance – I can’t imagine the pressure she was dealing with. She followed that up with her first world title, showing the consistency required of a world champion by winning the Grand Final to go along with WTCS wins in Cagliari and Hamburg. 

I do feel that there needs to be a level of consistency throughout the year to win the award. Taylor won middle-distance races from April to December – remember, she was unbeaten on that front all year. Cassandre’s only two “losses” in the World Triathlon realm this year came in March, a second at the Europe Triathlon Cup Quarteira, and April, a second at the E World Triathlon Championships in London. That’s why I would happily argue that either Taylor or Cassandre take the award over, say, Patrick Lange. While I would happily give Patrick the “performance of the year” for his incredible race in Kona, he wasn’t nearly as strong through the rest of 2024. I don’t think Patrick will be too worried about that, though – my guess is that even though he wasn’t as consistent, he’ll happily take his Kona win over Gregory Barnaby’s IRONMAN Pro Series title.

While I am not crazy about the coin flip idea, I am more than happy to let this be decided by votes – maybe through the forum?

Since I am the newbie editor here, I will leave that up to you, Ryan!

Ryan: I think that’s a very fair way of doing this.

Alright, Slowtwitchers: it’s now your choice. You can vote now in the forum thread for this article between our final three nominees.

The post 2024 Slowtwitch Awards: Triathlete of the Year first appeared on Slowtwitch News.