At long last, the test event for the 2016 Olympic Triathlon course has been announced. It will take place on August 1st and 2nd next year. This link has the details: http://www.triathlon.org/news/article/rio_test_event_dates_announced
It is actually at a reasonably convenient time for the ITU guys so I imagine that the Brownlees and Gomez will target it. I’m totally ignorant of Rio’s topology: it is liable to be hilly as rumoured? The description mentions “climbing up” so presumably it is.
So interesting that it isn’t a WTS race. London 2011 was WTS, right?
And London 2010. And London 2009 (which provided experience for the 2012 course).
It is crazy that the ITU world series is going to be interrupted by this race but I suspect that the Brownlees in the UK will target this race as their season highlight rather than go all out for the World Series (which doesn’t mean that they can’t win it)
It doesn’t seem to me that the ITU series is really disrupted by the test event. They have 2 and 3 weeks either side, which is pretty much typical for the rest of the season. I can’t imagine that they will have been planned without cooperation between ITU and ROCOG.
In any case, I would guess that it will be a well attended event primarily because of the race experience available but secondarily because of the qualification points. I’d imagine that the only people specifically targeting this race would be those who are on the boundary of getting qualification points. It’s very hard to know at the moment who that will be (i.e. from a season planning perspective) so I would expect a similar level of focus for the surrounding events, i.e. business as usual as far as the ITU racers are concerned.
It doesn’t disrupt the ITU world series but there is a definite limit to how many Olympic distance triathlons the top guys are willing and able to enter in a season. So it will likely reduce the depth of fields in some of ITU events. Brazil is important not just for the race but to enable national teams to work out where best to train and stay before hand etc (i.e. whether to train at altitude in Europe and fly over or else base themselves in South America where they can accustom to the weather conditions etc)