Photos: The Brownlee Brothers
See the rest here:
Photos: The Brownlee Brothers
See the rest here:
Photos: The Brownlee Brothers
Emma Moffatt and Laurent Vidal lived up to their headliner status in Geelong on Sunday, with the top-two ranked athletes in the field taking the titles at the 2012 Geelong ITU Sprint Triathlon Premium Oceania Cup. In the women’s race, athletes faced windy conditions around the Corio bay course but the layout held no fears for Moffatt who lead the women out of the 750m swim leg. New Zealand’s Teresa Adam and Sarrisa de Vries were hot on her heels, but on the bike leg the Dutch athlete was dropped early as Moffatt and Adam battled for the lead throughout the 20km leg. They opened up a 50-second gap to the chasing pack, which became nearly a minute and half by the end of the 20km circuit and the transition to the 5km run. But once off the bike there was no looking back for Moffatt who put 30 seconds into Adam and the rest of the field with a stunning opening lap, and claimed her third Geelong title and second Australian sprint championship. Germany’s Anne Haug and Great Britain’s Liz Blatchford both ran past Adams into silver and bronze respectively. Moffatt said afterwards she went hard in her first lap of the 5km run to guarantee the win. “I was just trying to stick with Teresa in the swim and on the bike. It was a good challenge for me to stay with her; and then I felt pretty good on the run so I just went for it and finished it off. I didn’t want anyone running over the top of me,” said Moffatt. “That’s the competitor coming out. It’s always nice to have someone chasing, or having someone right there to chase – it’s the high pressure situations.” The sun broke through for the start of the men’s race, with Australian James Seear emerging first from Corio bay to open up a narrow lead over the 56-strong field. But the local and international challengers bunched at the start of the bike leg, with Chris McCormack driving the front of the lead group. As the first 20 riders stretched out down the road, Australia’s Brendan Sexton pulled out with a broken seat post. A mass of riders then hit T2 together, but the race eventually came down to Vidal and Great Britain’s William Clarke who had opened a gap in the closing stages. After shadowing each other on the last lap, Vidal managed to kick away with the finish line in sight. He finished in 55 minutes, 19 seconds, holding off Clarke by two seconds. New Zealand’s Tony Dodds was in third. Read more: Triathlon.org
The Sunday of sprint distance racing ( read the Geelong recap here ) continued in Barbados when both Daniel Unger and Lauren Campbell broke long ITU winless stakes at the 2012 Bridgetown ITU Sprint Triathlon Pan American Cup. In the men’s race, a quick transition was enough to hand former ITU World Champion Unger his first win since the 2008 ITU Hamburg World Cup. In Barbados, Unger was first out of the water in a group that was led by USA’s Ethan Brown and included Barbados’ Jason Wilson and Russia’s Igor Polyanskiy, but the rest of the field were close behind. Not that much changed in the bike leg, and most of the field entered T2 together. The deciding moment then came not in the run, but in transition. Unger swept through T2 in 14 seconds, while Costa Rica’s Leonardo Chacon took 17. In the end, although Chacon had a run leg of 15 minutes and 26 seconds – one second faster than Unger’s time of 15:27, he couldn’t quite make up the deficit. The USA’s Manuel Huerta claimed bronze with a time of 55:36. Read more: Triathlon.org
Photo: Paul Phillips Great Britain’s Helen Jenkins, who is training in the Canary Islands, blogs about how she’s feeling with the Olympic games six months away. The Olympic opening ceremony is six months away today. After all the years of talking about London 2012, it now seems incredibly close. Yet, when I look at it in terms of my training plan, the weeks of competitions, it still seems there is a lot more work ahead – a lot more miles to cover on the bike, a lot more running, a lot more swimming. Like all the 550-odd British athletes hoping to be in London, this is not a glamorous time of the year but a very important one of which the public is probably not very aware. Out of sight and mind and before the competitive season starts in the spring, this is when we put in a lot of the work building up our core strength with the aim of peaking on that special day, which for me is the women’s triathlon on August 4. As far as I am concerned, life stops after that – I have not thought about what I will be doing after that day in Hyde Park, except maybe cheering on the GB men in their triathlon three days later. I have just arrived in Lanzarote for three weeks’ warm-weather training. The British squad were here before Christmas and I have come out for more work with my husband, Marc, who is my coach, and also here is one of our top men, Jonny Brownlee. Read more: Express.co.uk
Triathlete.com caught up with American Olympic hopeful Matt Chrabot during a training run in San Diego, Calif. Chrabot lays out what it will take to make the American team and what he’s sacrificed to hopefully get to London. “I helped the U.S. earn a spot on the Olympic start line. That spot is pretty much my baby. I think it belongs to me. You’re going to have to rip it out of my fingers to get it from me.”
