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.

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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.  

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