The second stop of the 2025 World Triathlon Championship Series sees the action head back to the familiar surrounds of Yokohama's Olympic-distance challenge on Saturday, site of both crash chaos pain and Olympic qualification joy just 12 months ago.
Current Series number one Hayden Wilde is out after a bike crash of his own in Tokyo derailed an impressive start to his season, marathon man Alex Yee continues his blue carpet detour, and the door now sits open for those who pushed that duo so hard in 2024 to take charge of the world title race.
It's a 1.5km harbour swim in two laps, a 9-lap 40km bike and 4-lap 10km run that awaits, along with 1,000 Series ranking points to the winner. The top 3 scores plus those earned at the Championship Finals Wollongong will count towards the final tally, and with eight stops in 2025, there will be plenty eyeing the big prize.
Watch the men’s race on TriathlonLive.tv from 1pm local time on Saturday 17 May.
Matt Hauser looked destined to have a big impact on the 2024 title race after a second Yokohama silver started last year in style, only for a crash early on in the Grand Final bike segment to deprive him of bumper rankings points and a likely career-best finish.
The Australian looked back to his very best in Abu Dhabi in February, however, where a 14:13 run split over the 5km saw him shadow Hayden Wilde right down to the final strides of the race and end up with second. With more Series wins than anyone else on Saturday's start line, and on a course he has gone 2-2-4 in the last three editions, the 27-year-old will be sharp, hungry and ready to go one better than last year.
No doubt Hauser will need to keep Vasco Vilaça at bay over the closing stages. The Portuguese star, fifth in Paris, third in Abu Dhabi, looks ready to detonate something special this weekend, as he did in 2024 before getting caught up in the crash that effectively ended his challenge. But Vilaça isn’t one to hold back and his run form looks lightning fast. Is this the moment for a career-first Series win after seven podiums at the top level?
French ready to fire?
French duo Dorian Coninx (#28) and Leo Bergere (#23) – back-to-back World Champions in 2023 and 2024 – find themselves in unfamiliar territory further down the start list having missed out on the Abu Dhabi opener.
Bergere may not have had the off-season he would have wanted battling both injury and illness, but showed no lasting effects on route to a superb silver on T100 debut in the heat of Singapore last month. For Coninx, it was here that his Olympic dreams were shattered along with his wrist in that last-lap bike crash, and redemption as well as medals will be firmly on the menu on Saturday.
USA’s Morgan Pearson steered clear of the chaos and then ran his way to a gold-winning 29:11 time for the 10km run in 2024. Besides a starring role in the Team USA’s glittering Olympic Mixed Relay silver, that was as good as it got for the American that last campaign, and he will be happy to be back at his most successful of venues to get his 2025 challenge up and running.
Young stars on the rise
Two of the youngest contenders for medals are Germany’s Henry Graf and Ricardo Batista of Portugal. At just 23 years old, Graf has had to be patient for his WTCS starts, but seized the opportunity greedily in Abu Dhabi with a superb 4th place and seized gold in the Lievin Indoor World Cup. The complete package, his first Yokohama bike will be one to watch.
Batista, a year older, is another young gun with no apparent weakness across the disciplines. He showed his class and maturity with a sixth-placed Olympic debut in Paris and also took a career-best fifth at WTCS Cagliari in 2024.
Ben Dijkstra, Hugo Milner and Max Stapley lead the way for Great Britain, Dijkstra having been the team’s top finisher in Abu Dhabi on WTCS debut, two spots ahead of Stapley.
Milner put in a 14:14 lightning-fast 5km run he will want to test again over the Olympic distance just a few weeks after pacing the London marathon to the halfway mark in 64 minutes. It was here he made his Series debut a year ago, finishing 39th even with the 4th fastest 10km run split of 29:30. One to watch.
Japan’s medal hopes sit largely with Kenji Nener, Tyler Mislawchuk makes his first Series start of the year after coming through a tough T100 debut in Singapore and Brazil’s Miguel Hidalgo scored a first Series podium in Weihai last September and will want to put together another strong trio of disciplines on a course where he clocked the second fastest run 12 months ago.
WTCS YOKOHAMA
17 MAY 2025, from 1pm local
START LIST
TRIATHLONLIVE.TV