The decision of skipping the Winter Duathlon World Championships to focus on Triathlon instead proved to be the right one for the athlete representing the Russian Triathlon Federation Daria Rogizina, that stormed the field in Andorra to claim her second Winter Triathlon world title. Italian Sandra Mairhofer crossed the finish line in second to open the scoreboard for the Italian team, while Norway’s Elizabeth Sveum grabbed the bronze medal.

The frigid temperatures in Andorra forced the officials to make some adjustments in the bike course after the familiarization the day before the race, to avoid some downhills with ice patches, but the course was still hard enough: a 3-lap snow run before transitioning to a hilly and technical mountain bike course of two laps and onto the two-lap ski… to then repeat it all again before crossing the finish line. In total, 8,2km run; 13,2 km bike and 12,4km ski.

With the temperatures only slightly above zero degrees, 14 women lined up for the start of the Elite and U23 2022 Andorra World Triathlon Winter Triathlon Championships. And the two times world champion Daria Rogozina showed from the start that she will be the one to beat. In the first lap of the run, she managed to break away from the rest of the field, and she never looked back, doing solo the whole race. She had most of the the fastest splits of the day, and dominated the race from the beginning to the end.

So for the rest of the field, it was the battle for the silver and bronze what kept the race alive, with the 2021 world champion Mairhofer playing the cat and mouse game with Svetlana Surikova (RTF) and Svetlana Sokolova (RTF), both of them staying quite close behind and avoiding penalties.

It was in the second leg when Mairhofer started to show her cards and pushed really hard on the bike, knowing that the lead was almost impossible to catch, but breaking away from the russian athletes. And coming from behind, it was a matter of the first few meters of the bike that Norwegian Sveum proved that she is one of the strongest athletes on the bike and ski combination. A flat tyre for Sokolova right after leaving transition for the fourth time ended with her medal hopes, and Sveum continued the chase with only one thing in mind: the podium that slipped through her fingers last year, when she crossed the finish line in third place but was then disqualified for not serving a penalty.

The last leg of the ski was just a magnificent display of Rogozina, in full form in Andorra after two weeks in the bautiful resort of Naturlandia getting used to the altitude, and fully recovered from giving birth to her first son. She crossed the finish line to claim her third world crown, with a difference of over four minutes with Maihofer, who finished in the second place. 

“I am really happy to be back in the podium here”, said Rogozina. “After winning the Russian winter triathlon championship I came here for training and it did pay off. I decided to skip the duathlon to save energies for today, and I think it was the right decision. Today’¡s race was really hard, I don’t know if I could have done it it I would have raced two days ago”, she said.

Maihofer also decided to skip the duathlon, which allowed her to go full gas at the end of the race. “The venue was beautiful but it was hard. Even though I am really used to long distances and I loved this format with so many transitions. For me it was an ideal race, and I am very happy to come back home with a silver medal”, she explained.

Redemption day was for Sveum, who finally got an individual medal in the Winter triathlon world championships. “I am a really strong biker and skier but not so much a good runner, that’s why I skipped the duathlon and focused my training on this event, and it was great to be able to finish in the podium”, she said.

Behind her, two athletes representing the Russian Federation, Yulia Surikova and Valeria Kuznetsova, who was also crowned the U23 world champion, while the second norwegian girl, Julie Meinicke, adding this medal to the U23 Winter Duathlon world title she won only two days ago. The bronze medal in the U23 category was for Olga Cheremisinova (RTF).

In the Junior race, disputed over a sprint distance but the same format of repeating two times each leg, the gold medal was for another Norwegian, Vittoria Nitteberg, who also claimed the victory in the Duathlon World Championships, followed at the finish line by Kseniia Skvortsova (RTF) and Katja Krenn (AUT).