Originally published at: 2024 Slowtwitch Awards: Women’s Short Course Athlete of the Year - Slowtwitch News
We’re now onto the Short Course Athlete of the Year nominees to close out 2024 and ring in 2025. It means rolling back through all of this year’s short events, including but not limited to the Olympic Games in Paris, the WTCS Season, supertri, the eSports World Championships, and more.
Ryan: Alright, Kevin – let’s look at who had outstanding season’s for women. I suppose we should really start this with Cassandre Beaugrand, right? Ran the table for the World Triathlon Championship Series events she raced, plus the Olympic gold.
Kevin: Yep, I think this conversation pretty much starts and finishes with Cassandre. Olympic champ, world champ, won on the biggest stages when it mattered most. (And, as I am sure you’re sick of hearing me say … won gold despite the pressure of an entire country on her shoulders.)
Ryan: I think we can make a realistic case for Beth Potter. She won the e-Tri World Championship in February and then finished no worse than third in any other World Triathlon race she participated in during 2024. That includes dueling bronze medals in Paris for the individual and mixed team relay events, and then a second place at the Grand Final.
Add it all up and World Triathlon has Potter ranked number one, not Beaugrand. Couple it with her contributions to the mixed team relay rankings (second in the world, versus France in eighth), and you could say, just based on those rankings, Potter deserves the title.
But I also think it’s really hard to overlook the dual crowns Beaugrand took in 2024. If it was just the Olympic Games victory, you could maybe write that off as a one-off. But earning both that and the WTCS title in the same year? And she’s not the world number one right now? That tells me World Triathlon has some work to do on their points system.
Kevin: Yeah, hard to imagine how you possibly put Potter ahead in our Triathlete of the Year ranking. I think the World Triathlon Points system takes into account results from the previous year, too, which is why Potter remains at the top, but when you look at 2024, there really wasn’t any way you could say she was better than Beaugrand. Sure, she won the E World Triathlon Championship in London, but after that it was all Cassandre (almost) all the time. As much as I applaud Potter’s incredible journey from Olympic 10,000 m runner in 2016 to Olympic bronze-medal triathlete, when it comes to Triathlete of the Year voting, she just didn’t have the results.
Beaugrand’s season was so good that it even negates bringing up third straight supertri title – she took that after finishing fourth in the final race in NEOM which was won by … Cassandre Beaugrand.
Does this one even require a vote?
Ryan: For the sake of argument, let’s talk Taylor-Brown (and supertri) for a minute, as it’s definitely relevant. She won three of four their races before heading to the final in Neom. She beat Beaugrand head to head three times in a row. And was a critical component of that GB bronze medal in mixed team relay. She was arguably just as dominant at supertri as Beaugrand was at WTCS racing.
But that’s just the respective series crowns. And Beaugrand still won Olympic gold on top of that.
Kevin: Totally happy to have that argument, for sure. Although, I now find it interesting that the mixed relay suddenly factors into your voting process when it didn’t with the overall Triathlete of the Year conversation!
Ryan: Don’t you start bringing logic into the conversation.
Kevin: OK, I’ll give you that …
OK, back to the supertri/ Taylor-Brown argument … I had a great interview with Beaugrand before the Boston supertri event, and she basically said she was just happy to have made it there after the insane few weeks she’d had since the Olympics. She knew she wasn’t going to be truly competitive, but still hung in for eighth that day. A week later she was second in Chicago and finished second to Taylor-Brown again in London and Toulouse. Then she took the win in NEOM where Taylor-Brown was fourth. So it’s not as though Beaugrand wasn’t competitive on the supertri front.
There’s also the format question. To me it’s like the clay court tennis swing, where some athletes really excel on that surface, but aren’t always in the mix to be considered the top athlete of the year. (I won’t stir things up by asking anyone here to weigh in on which is more important, Wimbledon or the French Open …) Supertri is definitely a unique format that suits Taylor-Brown perfectly. Until that format appears at the Olympics, though, I think I’d prefer to have enjoyed Cassandre Beaugrand’s season over GTB’s.
As with Potter, that’s not to take anything away from Taylor-Brown and her incredible journey back to the top echelons of the sport, but I just can’t see an argument for putting her at the top of the list.
So, in the end, I think this one is pretty simple – Olympic gold and a world championship makes this one a pretty easy pick!
Ryan: Agreed!
Kevin: Cassandre Beaugrand is our women’s Short Course Athlete of the Year.
