Age Groupers in Marbella: Ireland's Aisling Coppinger and Rob Cummins and Their Path to Worlds

bsnidermcgrath · November 7, 2025, 11:18am

Originally published at: Age Groupers in Marbella: Ireland’s Aisling Coppinger and Rob Cummins and Their Path to Worlds - Slowtwitch News

Aislin Coppinger and Rob Cummins will both be racing in Marbella this weekend. Photos: Kevin Mackinnon

Every triathlete has a different story of how they got into the sport, but most had similar feelings after that first race — they got hooked and couldn’t wait to do another. That was the case for Dublin’s Rob Cummins, who fell in love with triathlon soon after getting into it. His partner, Aisling Coppinger, only stuck with the sport because Cummins kept dragging her back into it.

“When I did [an IRONMAN], I thought, ‘Well, that’s that,'” Coppinger says. “I didn’t really want to ever do another one. But then I happened to get a Christmas present of another entry.”

Coppinger gives Cummins a playful shove as she recalls this particular Christmas gift, making Cummins laugh and shrug.

“She enjoyed the first one so much, so I thought, ‘That’s a really good idea,'” Cummins says. Coppinger reminds him that she did not, in fact, enjoy her first race, and she actually ended up in the hospital afterward.

Cummins and Coppinger will certainly have some of the most vibrant rides on the course in Marbella.

“I got leptospirosis,” she says. (Leptospirosis is a bacterial infection that can be contracted from swimming in dirty bodies of water.)

“That was a couple of weeks in hospital,” Coppinger says.

In Cummins’s defense, Coppinger wasn’t a fan of the getting sick after the race, but he had a feeling she could fall in love with triathlon if she completed another one in good health. The race entry he bought her for Christmas was at IRONMAN Switzerland, and Coppinger says she “slogged around” that course. She made it to the finish, but she wasn’t sold on the sport yet.

“No, I wasn’t hooked,” she says. Her introduction to the sport was years ago, and while she continued to race (mainly because Cummins was going anyway so she figured she might as well enter the events as well), she admits that she didn’t truly fall for triathlon until last month after she competed in Kona for the first time.

“Going to out to Kona, she was saying, ‘This is one and done,'” Cummins says. “And then, two days after she finished, she said she wanted to race Kona again, that it was the best experience of her life.”

Coppinger added to that, saying, “I consider myself hooked now, but it probably took 17 years.”

Cummins has raced in Kona before, and Coppinger checked it off her bucket list this year, so the next goal is to get to Kona to race together. First up, however, is Marbella, where they will both be racing. Neither has competed at the 70.3 worlds before, so this is a new experience for both of them.

Cummins and Coppinger own and operate a small chain of bike shops in Dublin called Wheelworx, where they deal exclusively in Trek bikes. Because of this, they rock up to races with some of the latest and coolest rides from the American brand, and this weekend will be no different. Along with chatting with the couple, Slowtwitch was lucky enough to get shots of their bikes, which will be hard to miss on the course in Marbella this weekend.

Cummins’s Trek Speed Concept SLR9 eTap AXS

This design is available to anyone, but Trek has the bikes hand-painted, so no two designs will be identical, Cummins says.

Drivetrain

Groupset	SRAM
Crank Length	165
Chain Rings	48/35
Power Meter/Pedals	Look Keo Blade/SRAM Red Crank
Cassette	10-33

Cockpit

Aerobars	Integrated
Front Hydration System	Trek/Bontrager BTA

Saddle

Saddle

Bontrager Hilo Pro

Wheels

Front and Rear Wheels	Zipp 454 front/Zipp 808 rear
Tires	Continental 111 26 mm front, Pirelli PZero RS tubeless 28 mm

Coppinger’s Trek Madone SLR9 eTap AXS Gen8 Project One: Ciclamino Giro d’Italia Edition

After Trek cyclist Jonathan Milan won the Ciclamino jersey at the Giro d’Italia, the company gave him a custom bike to commemorate the achievement. Coppinger loved the look of it, so Cummins spoke to some friends at Trek to see what they could do. Coppinger laughs and says it was “a bit of a better gift” than the IRONMAN entry.