Brownlee eyes final shot at glory in mixed event
Jonny Brownlee will have one more crack at winning an elusive Olympic title when Britain head into the inaugural triathlon mixed relay tonight as favourites for gold.
Brownlee twice finished behind his double Olympic champion brother Alistair in the men’s race to pick up minor medals, before missing out on the podium this week when he finished fifth.
For the first time, triathletes have a second chance to win an Olympic medal, with the inclusion in Tokyo of the mixed relay. The race features teams of two men and two women, each of whom complete a shortcourse triathlon of a 300metres swim, 6.8km bike ride and 2km run before tagging their team-mate to take over. A conventional Olympic distance triathlon takes place over a 1500m swim, 40km bike ride and 10km run.
The superfast event – which usually takes about one hour 15 minutes to complete – was staged at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014. England won that, before taking silver behind Australia on the Gold Coast in 2018.
France arrived in Japan as the nation to beat, having been crowned world champions in 2018, 2019 and 2020, European champions in 2018 and 2019, and pipping Britain to victory in the test event over tonight’s Tokyo Bay course in 2019.
However, only one French athlete finished higher than 13th in the individual races this week.
By contrast, Britain claimed two silvers courtesy of Alex Yee and Georgia Taylor-brown, while Brownlee finished fifth and Jess Learmonth ninth. No other country comes close to such depth.
The United States and Australia are also expected to challenge for medals in a race in which neither of the Olympic individual champions will compete.
Flora Duffy, who became Bermuda’s first Olympic champion in any sport, is the only triathlete from her tiny Atlantic island competing at these Tokyo Games.
Fellow gold medallist Kristian Blummenfelt is also without a team after Norway qualified three men for Japan but only one woman. A total of 17 teams will compete.
Brownlee has confirmed this will be his last Olympic race before he follows his brother Alistair’s lead into longer-distance events.
The great unknown with the mixed relay is whether athletes who train for an endurance event are able to translate their ability to a significantly shorter distance. Each will compete for about 20 minutes compared to the traditional event, which takes about one hour 45 minutes for men and two hours for women.
“I’ve prepared really hard for this [Olympic distance], doing longer stuff,” Brownlee said, when asked about the mixed relay. “This was my main focus, but we’ll give it a good go.
“The boys normally let us down in the relay, but hopefully if we’ve got a second and a fifth in the men’s, and the girls come away with a medal, that’s going to be a great mixed-team relay.”