B_Doughtie wrote:
Wtcs is the top level of the Olympic format. Within Wtcs there is sprint and Olympic distances. The Olympic distance makes up only about 1/3rd of the events these days. There has been “rumors” of DL going to sprint distance for Olympic race. but I’ve heard that rumor as early as 2011.
There is the Wtcs series rankings and then there is Olympic points ranking. They have slight difference in what events count, etc. 2 year Olympic Point build up each Olympics and the Wtcs series is every year.
Grand final is more points than other events, and it’s been that way for about 10 years now where they removed the 1 day “world championship” winner take all.
To add to what Brooks (correctly) wrote:
You can see triathlon as (almost, but the Norwegians have smashed that in the last year or so) being two different main sports: long distance (Ironman, PTO, etc) and short distance.
Short distance for the most part is 'owned' or rather organised by our international federation for the sport of triathlon, World Triathlon (formerly know as the ITU or International Triathlon Union).
There are a few tiers of races that athletes can compete in depending on their level at any point in time: Continental races (such as European Cups, Oceania Cups, America Cups, etc), then World Cups, and finally the top series (with about 7-8 races every year is the World Triathlon Championship Series (or WTCS). The race in Abu Dhabi is the final race of that series, and counts for double the points (to place in the WTCS final ranking to be crowned World Champion) compared to the other races in that series.
All of these races (all tiers) also allow athletes to score points for either their World Triathlon individual ranking (this is important to have access to some races, although ultimately that decision is up to each athlete's national federation whether they are entered or not) or the Olympic rankings (both for individuals and nations) within an Olympic qualification cycle (races counting for qualifying for the Paris 2024 Olympics started in May this year and qualification should run all the way to about May/June 2024).
All these races (all tiers) can be done in any of the official formats allowed for short distance triathlon under World Triathlon rules. Super Sprint (various formats including some used by the Super League for example), Sprint and Classic distance (the Classic distance was once called Olympic distance but that is not factually correct as this could change at any point in time as Brooks alluded to in his response).
As the op and Brooks have noted, while for the elites there is not a one day World Championship race anymore, the WTCS Grand Final is the closest we have for a World Championship for our sport (short distance, and even overall as Long distance is for the most part ran by 'non-official' private organisations and not the main body that represents our sport).
Also, the level of WTCS racing is very high and especially (compared to long distance) runs with very deep competitive fields.
Finally, there are other short distance formats on top of the tiers I mentioned above. Typically many national federations will also have their own series of races domestically, the best know of those being the French Grand Prix which attracts very deep and competitive fields from France and abroad. And some other 'private' enterprise the most famous of them being the Super League Triathlon (SLT), which invites a limited set of triathletes from the World Triathlon circuit (and sometimes others like Cameron Wurf in Malibu) to contest their series over a short period of time (usually in discussion with World Triathlon, they place their races in a part of the calendar that doesn't include World Triathlon races. This year was a bit particular, as the World Triathlon series finishes very late in the year, but usually SLT starts in September just after the WTCS series has concluded).
Hope this helps shed even more light on what we're talking about this coming weekend and how short distance triathlon works.