The final weekend of 2024’s World Cup calendar lands in the south of Japan on Saturday morning, and a familiar favourite in its sprint-distance guise: Miyazaki.
This year’s action gets underway with a beach start to the 750m swim, transitioning into a winding 20km bike over four laps before the two-loop, 5km run to the tape that wraps around the bay.
With 43 men set to line up, including sizeable delegations from the hosts, Korea and France, there’s sure to be fireworks afoot as we close out the year, and you can watch it all unfold on TriathlonLive.tv and YouTube from 11am local time / 3am CET, just hours before the final blue carpet showdown of the season hits Brasilia.
Nener back with unfinished business
Top-ranked and a firm home favourite, Kenji Nener will wear the number one, and what a time it would be to score his as-yet elusive first World Cup win. Japan’s number one, the reigning Asian Games and Continental Champion and 15th-placed at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, there can’t be many neutrals out there who would deny the magic that would be his maiden win at this level to cap the year.
Invariably one of the first out of the water and aggressive on the bike, it was on the Hong Kong run that the 31-year-old went all in back in March, only for the flying Spaniard Gonzalez to take the nuclear option and detonate the final 500m.
Nener will be grateful the Spanish threat is diminished this time around. What remains red hot, however, is the French threat, with motor-men Yanis Seguin and Valentin Morlec proving themselves among the quickest in the business in Rome last month, Aurelien Jem and Maxime Hueber-Moosbrugger also with plenty of firepower and capable of ramping up the pointy-end pressure over 5km.
Dijkstra ready to strike?
The last sprint distance here was 2022, when Britain’s Ben Dijkstra produced the third fastest run of the day to haul himself up into 12th place. The injury-hit Brit starts his 8th race of the season this weekend, the most he has been able to compete since 2019, something he will see as a big win as he builds into the LA 2028 cycle. A top ten or even five would be even bigger, and expect teammate Jack Willis to also be pressing for the prizes after a first WTCS top 10 in Weihai.
Takumi Hojo is no stranger to an end-of-season podium after gold and silver in Korea in 2021 and 2023, both over the sprint distance. After the strains of the Tongyeong 10km run proved too much last weekend, could this his time to shine on home soil?
Reese Vannerson took Junior World Championship silver in Torremolinos and the young American talent will be full of a mixture of confidence and desire off the back of that title near-miss. Quick in the water, strong on the bike and rapid on the run, he was only nine seconds off David Cantero del Campo’s golden 5km in Valencia, and will be one to watch now and over the next four years.
The same should be said of Poland’s Maciej Bruzdziak, the bronze-winning breakaway boy along with Dylan McCullough in Tongyeong. Comfortably the performance of his career so far, can he follow it up with more of the same in Japan? Tune in on Saturday to find out.
The full start list can be found here.
