PODIUM POWER
Elite triathletes heading to town
The entries are in. The triathletes are en route.
The best stories in the sport, including five of the six podium people from the Tokyo Olympics became confirmed entries Monday and will be on the start line at the world triathlon championships Saturday.
Gold-medal winners Flora Duffy of Bermuda and Kristian Blummenfelt of Norway — both sensational stories in Tokyo — will be here.
Men's silver-medal winner Alex Yee of Great Britain and bronze-medal winners Katie Zaferes of the U.S.A. and Hayden Wilde of New Zealand are entered.
Six of the top 10 men and seven of the top 8 women from Tokyo will be on the property. More importantly from a competition point of view, nine of the top 10 men and all of the top 10 women in the overall World Triathlon Series standings will race the world triathlon championships here.
Duffy, who came out of Tokyo as one of the greatest stories in all of Olympic Games history, won an experimental event in Montreal on the weekend, consisting of a pair of mini elimination races to cut the field from 30 to 20 to 10 that they titled Super Eliminators.
Created to be a sort of jet-lag cure bridge between Tokyo and Edmonton, Duffy used it to stay hot and for point positioning.
The result moved Duffy into first place in the World Triathlon Series standings.
Now, if she wins in Edmonton on Saturday, she'll not only be the winner of the grand final but the world champion, as well.
The 33-year-old, if she wasn't already the Queen of Bermuda, the island nation with a population of 63,918, most certainly was when she won gold in Tokyo.
Representing Bermuda in the Beijing, London and Rio Olympics and winning the gold medal at the most recent Commonwealth Games in Australia the same year she was made an Officer of the British Empire, Duffy has twice won a World Triathlon Series championship and is now perfectly positioned to make it a hat trick here.
In Tokyo, she gave Bermuda its first Olympic gold medal in history and made Bermuda the smallest country population-wise to win a gold.
Neither Olympic gold-medal winner Blummenfelt nor Tokyo silver-medal winner Yee bothered with Montreal.
Blummenfelt, who won the most recent world triathlon championship in 2019 in Lausanne, Switzerland, will forever be remembered as the Olympic gold-medal winner who collapsed to the carpet after crossing the finish line, upchucking in volume and having to be placed in a wheelchair after he passed Yee to win it.
Yee and Blummenfelt are positioned 1-2 headed to Edmonton, in that order, but are so close that if either won, they'd not only be the grand final winner but winner of the world triathlon championship, as well.
“We couldn't be more delighted. We're thrilled with the field we're going to have here,” said event manager Stephen Bordeau of the way it has worked out.
Originally planned for last year with a $13-million budget and spread over five days with a Do North theme and a plan to welcome more than 3,000-4,000 age-group competitors from around the world and an equal number of family and friends, the event was lost to the coronavirus pandemic.
Rescheduled for this year without the age-group competitors due to border shutdowns, the budget was slashed to $9 million and was planned as a bubble event.
But just prior to the Olympics, the organizers got the go-ahead to open the gates at Hawrelak Park and allow spectators to line the river valley bike and run segments.
The way it worked out there will be no admission charges for anybody anywhere and now, suddenly, they've ended up with a show of shows.
It's like an Olympics do-over, minus the 38 C temperatures and 95 per cent humidity and minus the 6:30 a.m. start times in Japan. Temperatures are expected in the low 20s with little humidity. The women's event begins at 10:50 a.m. and the men's at 1:50 p.m.
The one thing in short supply, however, will be Canadian content.
The highest profile Canadian won't be on the property.
Tyler Mislawchuk of Oak Bluff, Man., who finished a disappointing 15th in Tokyo after winning the Olympic test event on the course, is out with an Achilles injury. But Amelia Kretz of
Ste. Therese, Que., who rallied from 27th out of the water to finish in the same 15th position, is headed here.
With only three of the eight World Triathlon Series events held this year, including the weird one this past weekend in Montreal, there's been no prize money to collect. And with double the prize money and double the points of the regular season events for worlds and the split of the US$700,000 series money available to both men and women, it's not an event you'd want to miss.
While it's not the welcome the world Do North event organizers had originally envisioned, when it comes to Saturday's two elite world title races, it's basically as good as it gets.