Waukesha’s Jorgensen just keeps on winning triathlons
Streak of triathlon victories reaches eight
Triathlon is a sport in which winning streaks are rare and domination is even rarer. That’s because anything that goes wrong during a race – getting caught up in a slow pack in the water, a mechanical problem with the bike, a slight miscalculation on nutrition or hydration – can take podium out of the equation.
Against that backdrop, Gwen Jorgensen has been, well, dominant.
The Waukesha native and former two-sport athlete at the University of Wisconsin hasn’t lost an ITU World Triathlon Series race in more than a year. She has won eight consecutive races, including three this year.
Jorgensen, 29, has owned the ITU podium since her last defeat on April 26, 2014. Her name has to be included in any discussion of the world’s most dominant athletes, but that’s not a discussion she’s willing to join.
“Definitely not,” Jorgensen said in a phone interview from Australia, her training base for much of the year. “I don’t feel that way. I feel like I’m a normal person and I get to do something amazing every day, which is train outside and be with my friends. It sounds strange when somebody says something like that.” Still, the results don’t lie. Jorgensen, the defending world champion, won the last five ITU World Triathlon Series races last year and the first three this season before skipping the race in Cape Town, South Africa, one week ago.
No woman previously had won more than five consecutive ITU races.
If Jorgensen gets off the bike within striking distance of the leaders, victory is almost a certainty because she is by far the best runner among the world’s elite female triathletes.
In her most recent victory, April 11 in Gold Coast, Australia, she was in the top eight after the 1,500-meter swim and stayed in the lead group through the 40-kilometer bike. She incurred a 15-second penalty in the second transition for improperly racking her bike, but it was inconsequential.
With a split of 33 minutes 35 seconds in the 10K run, Jorgensen
overtook the leaders and pulled away to a comfortable victory margin of 1:18 over U.S. teammate Sarah True. It was her 11th career ITU victory.
In the 2015 season opener in Abu Dhabi, Jorgensen left the water 35 seconds behind the leaders and stepped onto the run course 1 minute down. But with a burst of speed, she cut 45 seconds off the deficit in the first 2.5 kilometers of the run and wound up winning by 16 seconds.
In Auckland, New Zealand, in late March, Jorgensen posted the fastest run split by nearly 50 seconds and pulled away to an easy victory.
“I go into every race just trying to execute everything as best I can,” she said. “I can’t control what anybody else does. We train to compete well and I can only control my training.”
Jorgensen, a former accountant at Ernst & Young in Milwaukee, was a consistent top-five finisher going into the 2012 London Olympics, but a punctured tire in Hyde Park took her out of medal contention.
Later that year, in an effort to improve her training, she started working with coach Jamie Turner, whose highperformance team splits its time between Wollongong, Australia, and Vitoria, Spain.
She credited that move with her stunning improvement, even if it meant spending most of the year away from her home in St. Paul, Minn.
“(Turner) has a daily performance environment, he calls it, and there’s athletes from all over the world training together,” she said. “If you look at most successful athletes they’re in that kind of training environment, where they’re being pushed by other great athletes.”
These days, though, Jorgensen’s stiffest competition is coming from U.S. teammates True, of Hanover, N.H., and Katie Zaferes of Hampstead, Md.
With Jorgensen sitting out the Cape Town race, Zaferes took over the top spot in the ITU rankings with 2,905 points. Jorgensen fell to second place with 2,400 and True is third with 1,947. Lindsey Jerdonek of Brecksville, Ohio, is ranked fifth.
“Right now the USA is ranked 1-2-3 in the world and we have another girl ranked fifth,” Jorgensen said. “It shows that USA Triathlon has been putting a lot into their athletes. The U.S. is really strong and that keeps us all honest and on our toes.”
Jorgensen said skipping Cape Town was part of her plan for the season.
“There is so much travel involved,” she said. “We just wanted to stay home because the next race is in Japan (later this month in Yokohama). I decided to stay here in Australia and get a good training block in.”
Jorgensen said she was looking forward to a test event in August on the 2016 Olympics course in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
“Since the last Olympics I said I wanted to win gold in Rio in 2016, but I haven’t even qualified yet for the 2016 Games,” she said. “I have an opportunity to qualify at the Rio test event and that’s what I’m focusing on.”
In the meantime, she’s not concerned about the target on her back.
“I really don’t think about that at all. Honestly,” she said. “All I can do is go into every race and do was well as I can do. I have a huge respect for not only my competition but also the courses we compete on.
“I can only control what I can control, which is working hard and focusing on the process.”