It’s a good argument but….

1. No ITU Triathlete is going into the race with a 10k time goal. They are simply racing to place.
2. In the men’s race that racing to place requires a fast run.
3. In the women’s race it still requires a fast run but it’s different. In both Yokohama and Leeds the winner came from a break away on the bike. That’s a completely different race. You can bet there are athletes and teams right now working on two things. Covering breaks on the bike and working on running faster off the bike. Gwen had to run faster off the bike it was the only way she could win. If they can’t cover the breaks they will have to run faster.

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Dave Jewell
Free Run Speed

you can take a look an even Beth Potter (who is not normally in the breakaways) does not match Gwen's splits...I know a pure run cannot be compared with running after S+B. I just wanted to remark that it seems men have higher standard in general terms. AB,JB, Gomez..
were able to run sub 30s after a breakaway...
No women is able to crack 33.30 in a breakaway... not even able to crack sub 33 in a crowded T2....Gwen usually did it...so as the standards are rising I am looking forward to new girls ablr to run superfast even after a hard bike and swim.

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Spaniard. Sorry for my english for the sensitive ones :P

This pretty much says it all. It's less about time and more about racing, the current dynamics on the men's side are such that you need a monster run to have a sniff at the podium, whereas on the ladies side, the dynamics have moved away from the Dash for Cash most of the time, and in order to have a shot you need to be relatively close out of the water, meaning either you're racing in a break, or you're absolutely hammering to try and close the gap for the run to factor into the race, so nobody is approaching the run with remotely fresh legs to throw down those monster splits. The run splits on the World Tri circuit are generally driven by necessity, rather than purely by capability. Gwen ran like that because she had to in order to close gaps, the guys run splits started to dip when you started ending up with more and more stacked breakaways, and either needed to run away from others or run across.The women's will get there, we're now into the generation of complete triathletes, a lot like when the Brownlees and Norwegians and French came in on the men's side, once Beaugrand & Beth Potter sort out their cycling, they'll be in that ballpark, GTB is another likely candidate to be able to run like that, as well as others. It's also probably worth noting that the gap is still probably there between the average male swim split and average female swim splits, you just have a critical mass of stronger swimmers on the ladies side creating breakaways that are pretty close in pace to the main pack on the men's field.

I've said before that I felt that the ITU women were under-performing on the run compared to the men but they might also be swimming and/or bike harder compared to the men which would leave them with a slower run in comparison.

Still I agree that it's a different race than the men's and with a group starting together the winner only needs to run fast enough to win the race so it might not be a completely all-out effort.

The evolution of the men's and women's races have been a bit different. The women's race tends to evolve in paradigm shifts, where one dominant athlete comes in, changes completely how the races are raced, and it takes a while for others to catch up, before the next one comes and shifts it (Gwen J shifted things from the prior era of aussie led breakaways to where you would have a chase group get just close enough for stud runners to run across... and then Flora shifted things again to the current swim breakaway era, where the odd time it's a dash for cash, but generally there's a swim break that makes the race, and if you aren't in the primary chase pack, you're racing for minor places. The british ladies started to catch up to Flora, which is what we're seeing now, where you have several threats from the front, and fewer and fewer folks in the chase pack who can lead a bridge (Spirig, Jo Brown, Gentle, etc. There used to be Jodie Stimpson and Andrea Hewitt on that list too, but Hewitt's career is more on the tail end, and Stimpson has shifted to middle distance with the overcrowded Brit Pack, there are plenty of others in that group, but very few who could actually drive a reasonable chase (you still have some folks that race a Gwen J style race like Beaugrand, Rappaport and Potter, who the odd time can make the front swim group, but if not, they survive the bike, and then run people down, but they aren't the horses on the front riding their way back in).

The men had a Paradigm shift when the Brownlees came onto the scene, complete athletes really changing the dynamics, but others have now caught up, so you have a mix of big group romps and swim breakaways shaping races, as opposed to a defined consistent pervasive style of race... (you can see the ripples of that in the Norwegians and Belgians, guys that are almost front pack swimmers, but stud bike/runners who will chase ferociously to bridge, either creating a big pack, or bridging to a break, but that are not afraid to do the work themselves to bridge (which was probably the biggest difference when the Brownlees came in, because prior to that, there were fewer folks willing to stick their neck out to change the race on the bike, and people had to rely on domestiques, or lucking into a good group dynamic)

Yes, I pretty much completely agree.

I was really expecting to see more from Beaugrand (her running ability) but that stupid pandemic put a hold on everything :(

Beaugrand is likely to be a favorite for Paris, she just needs to sort out the bike... She currently needs to rely on the Spirigs and Jo Browns of the world to tow her back up if she misses the swim break...

a triathlon 10k run in the context of a 2 hour race is probably better compared to a solo half marathon than a solo 10k:
The time difference between the men (57:32) and women (65:16 in a women-only race) half marathon world record is 13.44 %, which is pretty much exactly the difference we saw between the fastest run splits in Leeds (13.49 %) and Yokohama (13.47 %).

The matter with Beaugraud is not being at the front pack, cause she is a good swimmer...the problem is to hold the breakaway. I remember a couple of races where she got dropped, so in case Learmonth,Duffy and Kingma hammer the bike she will suffer, as well as Summer (well , I think Summer will suffer more cause that Tokyo's circuit is sort of technical)....
if there is no a big gap between both groups, i would get dropped by purpose and wait for the chase group to outrun latter on.

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Spaniard. Sorry for my english for the sensitive ones :P

The difference is that Beaugrand knows the limitation, and if she gets dropped won't fight it and waits for the chase, Summer has a history of fighting to try and hang on and continuing to fight solo in between the groups and than absolutely cracking, and then end up getting caught and dropped by the chase pack, and ending up way off the back (especially on hard courses, it's happened a few times in Montreal for example). At the top level results have as much to do with knowing how good your are not, as they do with knowing how good you are.

this thread has delivered on insight...