Non Stanford has told me she'll stay on at Oly distance and not move up to 70.3, quite surprised, be interesting to see what the rest of her year will look like.

Also new wrinkle in the Tokyo saga... https://www.bloomberg.com/...ent-the-water-stinks while the water quality tests have been coming back clean on the venue (likely due to the screens inserted in the bay to filter out the bacteria from the venue portion), the water is back to smelling like a toilet again (as it did in 2019 when the e. coli counts were well above the allowable limits. It looks like there were talks about moving to Yokohama, but a number of athletes got sick there (including Joanna Brown who got a kidney infection from the water) after the WTCS race, despite the water quality passing the necessary standards... There might be legitimate reasons to need to call up the reserves for the MTR after all... Either that or possibly the first Olympic Duathlon... (they do hint at there being some contingency days where the venue is available, so that they could delay events a day or two if need be should the water quality dip below acceptable levels for a day or two)

As the days go by I am thinking Tyler has a good shot (small guy, won the test event, good in heat) It is the new version of Schoeman with a killer run... the only issue with him might be the swim...see if the french smash it in that boiling water cause it can cause serious damage...the top swimmers should be
Luis, Bergere, Connix, Schoeman, Schomburg, JB, Royle, Van Riel...and then maybe Gomez, Pearson and Hauser....One of the aussies will wait for Birtwistle but Luis, Schomburg, JB and Van Riel are top bikers....we´ll see if there is some gap and the battle Norwegians+NZ+Spaniards aginst the front pack if it exists...

Canada made the decision around 2016 to stop running a National Junior Series where the best Canadians used to race each other instead going to a regional events where athletes would just race athletes from their own Provinces which just waters down the competition.
Whereas in Europe they have gone the opposite approach and don't run as many National events choosing to increase the quality of racing by having European Junior Cups.
I think we are already starting to see the negative result on Canadian development pool.
I expect the numbers will continue to decrease as the jump from Provincial Racing to Elite is much harder now than it was 6 years ago. Time will tell but I feel very poor direction was chosen and will hurt development pool over the next 2 or 3 quads.

In 2019 Canada re-introduced the National development series for youth/jr/U23 athletes who were not yet racing the PATCO series (it's PATCO again, after a few years as CAMTRI). The events still tend to skew more regionally, but because there were points available that impact seeding for nationals and selection for World championships teams (Jr especially), you saw more people traveling for the races. Tri Can isn't organizing the races, but generally assigning the status to Cup series races run by various provinces. They use a very World Tri type model, with higher point events (i.e. Nationals), and lower points events (some of the more regional races) to yield final rankings. We'll see in another year or two whether this quells some of the slips in the development pool. There have been some promising results, Isla Britton did score 2nd at the European Jr Cup race in Tizsy yesterday (a very gutsy race, where she did the bulk of the work in the first chase pack to close down the break coming into T2), there was another Canadian in the finals for that race as well. We'll see too if Superleague Ottawa returns next year, there was a pretty stacked Jr/Youth field there in 2019 (it was a part of the National Dev series too). This year is still spotty in terms of racing in the various provinces, with only a few re-introducing schedules including Youth/Jr/U23, but apparently a bunch from different provinces are heading to Montreal for the WTCS weekend, to race in the QC Grand Prix series race super sprint heats and finals event. Hopefully we can keep the momentum and have more of these national type events to make sure we've got a group coming in behind the current stars we have, and it's not an 12 year lull like post whitfield (to be fair, Paula Findlay looked to take on that mantel in London, prior to injuries de-railing her race there).

The long beach race was pretty interesting, Tyler Mislawchuk won again (again with Sharpe practicing for his domestique role in Tokyo), Matt McElroy managed 3rd. Renee Tomlin won the ladies race.

Similarly, the Tiszy race ran as a European Cup race over the weekend and had a solid field of athletes including a mix of Conti Cup/World Cup athletes, and a few folks who got the OG selection shaft (the event is usually a World Cup, but with the proximity of the event to the OG, I suspect they were told either it's a conti cup or you need to move the dates if you want it as a WC, and they chose to keep their traditional dates). It followed their traditional Super Sprint heats, and Sprint finals format, with Csongor Lehmann grabbing victory for the home country fans, flanked by two Italians (Azzano & Sarzilla), Livvie Mathias won the ladies race ahead of Audrey Merle and Italy's Constanza Arpinelli (despite serving a 10s penalty), field include Kate Waugh, Natalie Vancoerverden, Dale & Lovseth from Norway, Beatrice Mallozzi and others. A few of them were using it as a tune up for WTCS Montreal after the olympics.

More excitingly, the OG men's race is less than a week away now...

There is some potential there, and some folks looming there, there's Lepage, Paquet, Briand and Hoel on the men's side that are showing some potential as well, but the idea of the Dev series is to create that funnel from Youth/Jr to the Continental cup series, and then to the world cup series as U23 athletes. We've been really good at pumping people up to the continental cup series, but we've had less success converting them to World Cup/WTS athletes. Huatulco was a positive sign with Solid results from Kretz, Jamnicky & Legault, and from Mislawchuk, Briand and Paquet (Sharpe raced well for the role he was playing).

A few of us were holding our breaths for the Long Beach race, hoping that nobody Tokyo bound would be felled by a crash in that race before leaving. There were similar thoughts in a few folks who raced in Tiszy on the weekend too (although they were mainly alternates, rather than starters).

At LB, as the pack turning into the transition area - which is the only tech element of the course - to finish the first lap, one of the south American athletes misjudged the corner and turned in too wide, hit the medium strip and went down. Luckily he didn't hit the deck too hard and was able to get up quickly, and since he was so wide and no one was following his line, it didn't cause any chain reaction. That's when I thought "whoa, this could've taken out a gold medal contender". Most of the Canadian high performance team was there and I saw them pacing back and forth, I am sure they were also holding their collective breath during the bike leg.

That makes zero sense, racing the relay "within himself" is a waste of the other three in the team's time. If I was one of them I'd be fuming. Surely if he withdrew completely they could pick a reserve?

Yeah, disappointing for Richard Murray.

I was looking at the final start list today for the first time, and it occurred to me that Portugal decided (interestingly) to put their eggs all in the experience basket by selecting both Joaos (Perreira and Silva) over last year's vice-world-champion and up-and-coming triathlon star Vasco Vilaca. Don't know how I feel about that one!!