At this moment in time, which triathlete leads the British men in the world rankings? You would be forgiven for automatically jumping to Alex Yee. The Olympic champion and 2024 world champion has carried the British torch this decade, becoming the most decorated Olympic triathlete in terms of medals for his trouble. However you would be mistaken.
While Yee stepped away to tackle the marathon in 2025, becoming Britain’s second-fastest ever in the discipline, the sport did not stand still. Now, there is a man at the head of the British bunch. Step forward 2022 World U23 champion Connor Bentley.
“Yeah, it's pretty wild,” acknowledged Bentley. “I remember I was sat down at a cafe with Jack Willis just after Wollongong which is when we realised that we were ranked 1 and 2 for the Brits and we were blown away. I didn't think I had a great season at the start, but then it picked up towards the end, that was really nice.”
“I'd had a few setbacks, so I'd capped training in certain ways, which I assumed I wouldn't race too well off the back off, but I did. So that's been really nice to know. I wouldn't have had the balls to drop my training as much in-season, but now I know that I can do that, it means I should be pretty consistent going forward.”
A bout of glandular fever early in the year, which was only caught in mid-April, ensured Bentley’s 2025 campaign endured a rocky start. A minor knee niggle followed. As a result, far from entering the summer with high expectations, in Bentley’s words he was “nervous I was just going to get torn apart on the bike.”
“It's really hard with the likes of Henry (Graf) and Tjebbe (Kaindl) ripping up the bike at the moment. It's really quite difficult if you've not done the hours.” To compound matters, his first discipline also felt out of touch.
“I'd say previously my swim has been consistent when I've been racing. And this year I didn't have that to rely on. I wasn't swimming that well, I was missing front packs and I was having to ride a bit harder.”
Nevertheless, upon his return to the WTCS in Hamburg, Bentley learned all was not lost.
“I think Hamburg was the first one where I ran well off the back of riding so hard, and I was like, ‘that's interesting. I've not run this quick in a World Series’. And then at French Riviera, I was just like, ‘oh, wow, I can ride hard and still run alright’.”
“Those sort of realisations mid-race were the big things this year. I think Wollongong was probably the most surreal one, though, because I was like, ‘I've just finished 12th in a second grand final’. I was really chuffed about that. I would have bit your hand off at the start of the year for that.”
Whereas Bentley’s telling makes for an account of disruption and inconsistency, when it comes to the races themselves consistency is the word that defines his recent WTCS outings. Across 2024 and 2025, Bentley has always finished between 12th and 18th in his Series appearances. Throw in a maiden World Cup win in 2024 – which he followed with a silver medal in the Tiszaujvaros heat that left him rather worse for wear until a godsend batch of watermelon slices revived him in the finish area – and it is easy to see how he ended last season ranked 21st in the WTCS and 24th in the world (at the time of writing he is up to 23rd). As a young and rising athlete, it seems unlikely his ascent will stop there.
At the same time, it has been a long road since Bentley burst onto the scene with his world title in Abu Dhabi in 2022.
“It is a slow burn, and I think that's the nature of the sport. It's an endurance sport at the end of the day. And that does take time to build up. And for me, that's the bit that I’m lacking. I'm confident enough with my speed. It's just taking years to develop this aerobic base.”
“When you look at past results and it's like, ‘oh, I didn't really kick on from there too much’. But fundamentally, the condition I was in at Worlds (U23 Champs in 2022) was a pretty low level compared to some of these guys that have been there since. Like, you take my thresholds versus some of the recent guys like Oli (Conway) or like (David) Cantero: these boys can run! Sometimes taking a performance at face value is a bit difficult in triathlon because, one, all the races are different and, two, the sport just seems to be evolving so fast at the moment.”
Improvement, though, whatever the pace, is the nature of the game for Bentley.
“I guess for me, what keeps me going is that I do just want to get better. It's about as simple as that. Everyone wants to be a world champion. Everyone wants to get to the Olympics. They want to win everything, but only one or two people can do that, can't they? Again, you'd love it to be yourself, but if I can finish a career and be like, I've quite comfortably pushed myself as hard as I could have possibly done, I've got to the peak that I could have ever got to, that's what gets me out of bed. That's the stuff that I want to be able to look back at and know that I gave everything.”
It’s an admirable mentality, one sufficiently intrinsic and detached from the baubles of the sport that become such a weight on many. On the other hand, Britain is renowned for its deployment of athletes as domestiques at major events. Sam Dickinson, for example, raced at Paris 2024 solely to enhance Yee’s gold medal prospects. Is there not a risk Bentley’s mentality flies in the face of potentially dovetailing with the broader system?
“It's a funny one, right.” He pauses for a moment and ponders aloud how much he can actually say. The diplomatic answer proving elusive, he puffs out his cheeks and drops perhaps the most candid answer any triathlete will give in 2026.
“We've had meetings in the past about being a domestique and look I do really like seeing fellow countrymen do well. It's great to see. Given my profile, there's actually not a lot I can do to domestique. There was a conversation a while ago with a group of us about one athlete and they sat us down and were like, ‘would you be comfortable to domestique?’ And it's like, yeah. But what am I going to do?”
“If I'm out with them in the swim, what difference am I going to make on the bike to help this person get back up to another pack? My skillset is not geared around that. In fact, it's more of a weakness that I’ve been trying to work on. So for me, I'm not against it, and I get some of the best athletes are domestiques because they just have this skillset that is unique to them. But it's just not the athlete I am. That's not my profile.”
As the newly anointed top Brit in the world rankings, perhaps the day is coming in which the domestique conversation revolves around supporting him? Bentley laughed at that. And not with the faux politeness of someone secretly nurturing such ideas. Rather, with Bentley, you get the sense anything outside his pursuit of improvement is just noise. When it comes to triathlon, nothing is ever that deep.
“The only thing that really changes year on year is where my focus sits between the three disciplines. I got pretty complacent with my swim. I was such a bad swimmer growing up. I was so bad. And then I got to like 2021/22 and I started making some front packs and I was like, ‘this is ridiculous’. I used to be third pack at a National Series type thing. So I was like, ‘oh, what a big jump, that's good’ and I neglected it.”
“It's not that I didn't work on it, but what I thought I could do was just let it sit while I moved on with the cycling in the running, and I couldn't. The guys got a lot quicker again and I just got left behind a little bit, which happened quite a bit last year. So it's been a case of just trying to find that balance between the three disciplines. And that's generally all I can really focus on. I can't overload myself with things like what race I am targeting three months, six months down the line. It's what am I doing today.”
“The tough part is a lot of guys are very public with their data. It's so easy to get caught up in what other people are doing, and I do this all the time. Like Strava’s awful for it, right? It's amazing that everyone is so open, more or less, with their data, with their power files or with their sessions and stuff. And I think it's really interesting. I think that's how we're going to move the sport on so much because people are going to learn different things. But at the same time, you see some people do some sessions and think, ‘woah, how am I ever going to outrun you?’ But in a race sometimes it just happens.”
On the face of it, he surely would not have to even scroll online to find impressive sessions to trawl. After all, being based in Loughborough Bentley trained alongside Yee and Cassandre Beaugrand in their build-up to individual triumphs at Paris 2024.
“It's pretty wild,” he conceded. “It’s weird because they both are just very normal so you don't really think about it like that too much. I just know them as Alex and Cass. I think that the main thing you take away from training with the pair of them is they don't do any mental sessions. Obviously there's a few that blow you away, but it's just it's just the consistency of it all. You can see why they’re so good. The bad sessions don't mean much to them. They don't tend to dwell on it that much. They don't tend to let the good sessions get carried away. Everything's kept in check.”
“I feel like it’s like Kung Fu Panda, isn’t it. There is no secret ingredient. You look across the world, everyone does it. I think the only difference between other places and Loughborough is just the volume of athletes we have in vicinity to each other, doing the same thing. I've tried to train on my own a few times, certainly before I came to Loughborough. And you don't think about it much from a consistency point of view day to day. It's not until you look back at your training and you realise I've had my most consistent blocks. I've just been doing the same stuff with the same people week on week. I think that's the difference.”
Sporting a moustache remarkably similar to the titular character of Marty Supreme, Bentley is about to head to Australia for a training camp before his season kicks off at WTCS Abu Dhabi. Thereafter he plans to hit WTCS Yokohama and the European Championships in Tarragona. “Given my season history it’s going to change. I've got weeks for something to go wrong between now and then. And if it doesn't, I'll crack on with plan A!”
The road is never quite straightforward when it comes to Connor Bentley. Not least considering his penchant for coupling superb sprint finishes with being rolled away in a wheelchair. Yet he is well-served by a zen outlook, thirst for self-improvement and refreshing honesty. His elite turn of speed on the run does not hurt either.
Whatever lows may come will pass. And for an athlete that has shown the ability to win at essentially every level up to the WTCS already, there will doubtless be plenty of highs ahead too. We should get used to Connor Bentley being at the top then. His time there will not be fleeting.