After ticking off a third T100 podium in three attempts in London at the weekend, Britain's great LA2028 hope Kate Waugh now lies second in the overall rankings at the halfway point of the season with a medal of each colour to her name.
That is an excellent return for the star of episode one of the second season of Dare To Dream, which premiered on 6 August on World Triathlon YouTube and the TriathlonLive platform.
Dialling in the distance in Denmark
The show picks up with Kate in Copenhagen dialling in the final preparations for her T100 debut back in early April, either unaware of or downplaying her potential to smash through the field in the searing heat of Singapore. As she reveals, the move to longer distance was all part of starting afresh after a tumultuous first Olympic Games at Paris 2024.
'I was really determined to try something different after the end of the Olympic cycle. It was a pretty intense period, and I just felt like I needed to channel my energy and training into something else just to feel a bit more refreshed and just try something new.
A lot of people said, ‘you're quite young to be trying slightly longer distances’, but I think my age within triathlon is quite high. I've been doing the sports since I was eight years old, so it definitely felt like the right time to try it for me. So perhaps my curiosity for the longer distance came earlier than it would for other people.'
Bumps along the Olympic road
As many have found before and many will again, there is little that can prepare you for the strains and stresses and potential rewards of an Olympic debut. As someone who had built up a name for big one day racing, there was certainly a lot of room for optimism, but events would conspire to prevent her from the preparation she would have ideally wanted.
'I have results as a junior, as a U23, but the Olympic build up just felt like a whole new kettle of fish and I didn't really know how to approach it. I felt like I should know what to do, and I just didn't.'
Add to that the turbulence of the selection process, one that was inevitably going to be difficult because of the strength in depth of the British women and little could prepare Waugh for the stop-start of what was to come. That had a major knock on effect for how she felt on the biggest start line for her life up to that point.
“I ultimately did qualify officially but, by that point, it had been three weeks of just lack of sleep, tears, trying to train when I should have just been ticking off training days. You spend your whole life wanting to qualify for this race, and it's the pinnacle of the sport. It's the thing you dream of and then you arrive there and it just didn't feel like any of that, and I just really struggled to enjoy that whole process.”
The Singapore slinger steps up
So then it was on to feeding that curiosity for some longer-distance racing that was clearly so needed as 2025 came into view. After racing the short and sharp WTCS Abu Dhabi, it was on to project Singapore, and the episode catches up with Kate as she reflects back on that T100 debut in Singapore.
What followed was possibly the biggest one-day performance of Kate’s career, given the number of variables at play from the heat to the unknown format to the strength of the field.
“I almost at one point was thinking. Does everyone know something that I don't? Because I feel really strong… but is this all gonna hit me? I remember almost doing a full body check, like 50km and being, like, are my legs okay? Are they about to fall off? No, that's fine. Is my head okay? Is it too hot? No, I'm okay. And then just being, like, let's just push on!”
The rest is history. Watch the full episode and subscribe to World Triathlon YouTube to catch episode two - Born To Run: Morgan Pearson - on Wednesday 13 August at 8pm CEST.
