Just two races in and the women’s 2025 World Triathlon Championship Series is already running hotter than the Sardinian sunshine as the athletes prepare for race number three: Saturday’s WTCS Alghero.
With no Cassandre Beaugrand or Beth Potter in the Abu Dhabi opener, Lisa Tertsch led a German podium sweep in the season opener. All three athletes lined up in Yokohama two weeks ago, only for the Olympic Champion to slide out in the rain and Jeanne Lehair to produce the perfect race and take the gold.
Now we head to stop three of this year’s eight-location Series, and a new venue on the Italian island of Sardinia that has been home to a decade of superb WTCS and World Cup action. Its north west-coastal city Alghero presents a fresh Olympic-distance challenge, where the two-lap 1500m swim transitions to a 9-lap 40km bike and then its 4 laps and 10km run to the medals. Expect a tempo as high as the temperature as the sport's biggest names chase the medals and ranking points on TriathlonLive.tv from 11.30am CEST on Saturday 31 May.
Lisa Tertsch leads the line as she did in Yokohama, but fewer than 150 points separate her and second-ranked Lehair. The German has been on quite the run of form since scoring her first Series silver on this very island 12 months ago in Cagliari, a race that set tongues wagging as to her Olympic credentials.
Now firmly established as the number one in an impressive crop of German talent, Tertsch is a formidable athlete with an analytical approach to her racing. How she handles the challenges of this brand-new course could be formative clues as to her potential for a career-first Series podium in Wollongong come October.
Jeanne Lehair’s consummate race in Yokohama will be both tough to top, and a huge boost to her own self-belief. Out of the water second, dialling the bike and then untouchable right out of T2, holding off the flying Tertsch and Potter for the first time over 10km will have felt like a huge moment for the Luxembourg talent.
It was at WTCS Cagliari two years ago that Lehair was mixing it with the best for the first time, finishing fifth both then and in 2024. Can converting those good positions into a medal become habit in Alghero on Saturday morning?
Britain’s Beth Potter may have run out of road in that Yokohama chase, but silver continued an incredible run of consistency at the highest level Thirteen podiums in her last sixteen Series races is an astonishing return, add in a world title and two Olympic bronze medals and it makes it hard to see beyond her for another big, big race to help set up another title shot in 2025.
Given Potter’s impressive stats, the fact that Cassandre Beaugrand is current Olympic and World Champion makes her own run of form all the more outstanding. After six wins on the bounce, the French star was out of sorts on a wet and windy Yokohama course, coming down after momentarily switching off halfway through the bike. It was a hard fall, but with cuts and bruises rather than breaks, it looks like she will be able to be back on the gas on Saturday in Alghero. Given the force of nature that is Beaugrand 2.0, the incident could serve to galvanize her determination to seize the gold just as she did a year ago, 250km south in Cagliari.
Then there are the new faces for whom a big performance could see them climb the rankings significantly. Rosa Maria Tapia of Mexico arrives after back-to-back Series top 10s for the second time in her career, and those following two golds in a week at the tail end of 2024 at the Brasilia World Cup and Vina Del Mar Premium Cup.
Diana Isakova (AIN) has done likewise and scored gold in the Samarkand World Cup, Germany’s Annika Koch and Tanja Neubert continuing to prove their pedigree at the top level in recent outings. Tilda Mansson (SWE) scored a career-best 8th in Yokohama, and Gwen Jorgensen will arrive buoyed by a best Series finish since her return to the triathlon frontline after that storming run to fourth a fortnight ago.
Expect a fast start from Therese Feuersinger and a battle for the Austrian’s feet at the horn, Maya Kingma (NED) and Summer Rappaport (USA) make their long-awaited returns and Leoni Periault will be out to prove her 30th place finish in Yokohama was a mere blip.
