rrheisler wrote:
The contract thing's been confirmed by an email sent to athletes a while back. Quote:
To support creating a more consistent calendar, the PTO will evolve its membership agreements to provide travel support and marketing contracts to the highest ranked athletes at PTO Tour events. Selection for these agreements will be based on your PTO Ranking – so there is no need to do anything different or change your current racing plans – just perform to your potential as a professional. We will use two ranking selection dates for this: August 21st and December 10th (accounting for the final rankings event of 2023 – which is Challenge Salinas) and share more information nearer the time.Essentially PTO rankings at the end of the year would dictate who would be offered them. Then a question of who accepts them, and how many of the PTO events are required to be raced under those.
And a lot of that seems to be all up in the air based on schedule, because I'd have to imagine they aren't going to try to counter-program 70.3 / IMWC / Roth for their dates. But you never know...
As I said before, though, the real winners of the World Triathlon alignment will be current gen WTCS athletes who will look to "graduate" to this distance in 2025 after the Olympic cycle and meet the "have enough ranking points to be competitive" standard to get into the races.
https://protriathletes.org/...ropean-open-sign-up/
Well timed warm-up race for the men heading for Kona 4 weeks later.
Almost undoable for women racing Nice 7 days earlier: well clearly doable but hardly sensible.
But that will free up start slots for the few top WTCS/Olympic women to have a taster.
Wonder who might be likely candidates to take on Gentle and Knibb (assume she will not race Nice but we'll see) for some decent money (and the chance to get points on the board for a contract for 2025, if they have finished with draft-legal).