It would behoove the ITU to not start any fights with Ironman especially now that they are sharing the same bed as the PTO.
But why? Just because a few years ago the PTO didn’t think things through when they chose the name for their new race series? Doesn’t sound like a very good reason to change countless swim, bike, and run courses, does it?
And while the PTO may have big dreams, their dreams are constantly shifting. And not because they’ve got a good track record at achieving them, but rather in response to the opposite. One could even say, PTO/T100 has a habit of overpromising and underdelivering. Announcing races before they have made sure that they will be able to actually run them and not paying athletes until after the next funding round, to name just two examples.
PTO seems very good at raising money from investors right now, but my worry is what happens when they finally run out of investors willing to pour more money into them? Who will be the ones left holding the broken remains of the house PTO promised it would build?
To be honest, that sounds like a terrible idea. Long-course and short-course triathlon clearly require sufficient specialization, that athletes have to chose to focus on one of them and won’t be able to excel in both. Which means that forcing triathletes to compete in both short-course and long-course races at the Olympics will result in neither the best short-course athletes doing the short-course race nor the best long-course athletes in the long-course race.
If you want long-course triathlon at the Olympics, it needs to come with its own spots for dedicated long-course triathletes. And considering the IOC’s policy on limiting the growth of the overall number of athletes at the Olympics, that means long-course at the Olympics is not a realistic prospect for the foreseeable future.
That’s fair. But then, for reasons I’ve indicated and @NeonTiger has outlined with greater care, races could look for another international brand (even if they have to build it themselves).
And if they don’t - I still think there’s a shitload of uncertainty here, so much so that neither the PTO nor we can assume that the races will just switch to T100 branding and that is that. They have autonomy and they have not been purchased.
I’ll also stubbornly say that the general succession clause and an exclusion of a change of control clause quoted by @rrheisler is irrelevant here as the contract will pertain to a specific brand.
For the two North American races on the calendar, this is indeed true
Montreal Esprit - 40 or so loops of the F1 track. Just cut off a few loops. The run goes around the swim basin so might be tricker but probably isn’t a deal breaker if you needed to be creative.
Quebec city - The bike is an out and back on the highway, x4 loops for the current 70.3. Would be easy to transition to a T25/50/100 format if they just shave off a km or two on the out. The run is 2 loops where one side has an out and back on a bigger road that’s just there for the extra kms. Can shave off 750m (x2 for out, and x2 for each loop) = 3 kms. The ‘challenge’ will be to find the extra 100m in the Basin for the swim, since they’re already being generous with the 1.9km title.
Would the distances be covered as well? e.g. ‘thou shalt offer these specific race distances’?
As ideal as that is, we continuously hear the IOC prefers more events with the same athletes. Not doubling up on the athletes. If that means Britain takes the Gold in T50 and New Zeland takes the Gold in T100, I don’t think at all that would be a disappointing Olympics.
It’s not like we’re taking about the difference between Cross Country Skiing and Ski Jumping here. The guy who took Silver in the ”T50” distance would likely take Gold in the T100.
Which is exactly why all the talk of long-course triathlon at the Olympics is so disconnected from reality. If Germany doesn’t get any extra spots for long-course, they won’t send Patrick Lange or Laura Philipp or whomever will be the current German long-course stars in the future instead of athletes who can excel at short course and the ultra-short-course MTR. A long-course triathlon event at the Olympics but for short-course triathletes at the Olympics is just silly.
On top of that, long-course triathlon is neither a sport which is particularly exciting to watch for people who aren’t triathlon fans through and through, nor one which has a large fan base. In other words, not an event which sounds particularly appealing from the IOC’s perspective as a prospective addition to the Olympics.
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I’m sure someone upthread looked forward to Sam Renouf voicing.
By long course, we actually mean T100 here. Patrick Lange and Laura Philipp might not be the choices from the German fed anyway for that distance. It would be a lot more feasible to have mostly ITU athletes racing all three and be a close approximation of the best of the best (a bit less for the T100 obviously if done right now, but there would be adjustments from athletes). A bit like Klaebo can dominate from sprint to the 50k in cross country skiing. I think Hayden and some others could too.
Have you looked at the T100 starting lineup lately? Other than Lucy Charles, and Sam Long they are practically all short course athletes?! It seemed pretty clear as this season got underway, to me at least, that T100 was becoming”long course light for short course athletes” and the closer integration with World Triathlon only confirmed it. I see no reason why it wouldn’t make an amazing product and highlight the epic athleticism for the same group of athletes to do a T50 and T100 in the same Olympics.
Let’s talk about Sifan Hassan getting the gold in the marathon and bronze in 5k and 10k in the same Olympics…
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I specifically asked my legal expert on this one (note: married to her). She’s dealt with these kinds of scenarios and generally speaking, the branding clause would be somewhat generic and would wind up just seeing the re-skin over to the new brand post-acquisition.
But YMMV.
Long (opinion), boring (opinion) and it would double the TV time required by triathlon (fact), which ain’t gonna happen (opinion but so informed that it’s almost a fact).
Also, if short course becomes non-draft, then that blows up the entire development path across feds for athletes aged 13+.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
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well what was the brand that tried a few years ago Ocean lava or something, by Keneth gasket ( not a nobody given he owns(ed) club la Santa ) how well did that go ? rev 3 , the nascar guy tried and failed, super tri seems to go down hill as well and challenge is also at best stagnating (long distance they have 3 races and that has gone down rather than up ) we had Tristar 111and 222that also failed powerman is a shadow of it self x terra as well. there was a German group as well they had a few races in Germany and spain I can’t even rember the name.how much do you hear from the norseman x treme series …
so I guess if it was easy it would work more often than it does and like 9 out of 10 times is seems to end in failure.
The announcement said they would run Challenge races under the Challenge umbrella. So I don’t think a rebrand is imminent.
From the release:
…will continue under the Challenge Family brand for the rest of the year as the two companies continue to plan for 2027.
And then:
The PTO and World Triathlon will unveil the further details of the new Triathlon World Tour , including branding, tiered competition structure and organisational set‑up, at an event in the first half of 2026, when fans, athletes, media and partners will be able to see, in one place, how a unified Triathlon World Tour will bring together the best of our sport into a single, compelling global format.
Standard language in these when you expect to see everything under a single brand in the not too distant future.
Major ick then, but then again, everything PTO is an ick and you won’t convince me otherwise for awhile.
Triathlon World Tour actually doesn’t sound that appealing, but YMMV.
In short:
- The examples you give are not relevant, for reasons I would call obvious, except Ocean Lava, which is alive and kicking.
- The alternative for the race organizers is not between Challenge/IM and a new brand. The alternative is between Triathlon World Tour and another new brand. Where the new brand is one they would control, and fund themselves. On the other hand, Triathlon World Tour carries the heritage of T100 (changing great courses to awful ones, last minute scheduling, and then 30% chance your race will be rescheduled or moved to another continent, good luck age groupers) and is backed by the PTO, which has proven time and again its funding is uncertain…
- And my point is not that they necessarily will go with something other than Triathlon World Tour, but that it’s not guaranteed that they will. The PTO did not buy races.
That development path exists solely because of the Olympics. If the Olympics change, then there’s no reason why a 15 year old needs to race draft legal. I have a 12 year old trying to get into the sport, and he’s more interested in non-draft, mostly because he sees me and what I do / watch. There sport having a disconnect between what most amateurs and professionals do, vs what the Olympians do is not good for the sport.
If they made the announcement about 2028, you’d have a lot of problems. But if they made the announcement today about 2036 then there’s more than enough time to change. (They obviously won’t make the announcement today, but my point is that if you give enough forewarning, then it shouldn’t matter)
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Including junior races becoming an equipment arm’s race? 13-year-olds on TT bikes?
The disconnect is not unrelated to the fact that these U23 kids are in it as a prospective career.
We can shrug off the issue of more money beating less money because we’re adults playing a fun game. And because we’re a lot more spread out than 0.1% apart.
That is all due to the T100 World Tour format with its year-long contracts apparently not being very attractive to most of the top long-course athletes. It is not about the 2/80/18 distance being more favourable to short-course athletes. Especially since most of the short-course athletes in T100 would be more accurately described as former short-course athletes.
A look at the history of T100 is pretty telling. Even in 2024, T100 still had 6 Ironman world champions among their contracted athletes (Philipp, Charles-Barclay, Sodaro, Ryf, Haug, and Laidlow), though Blummenfelt and Iden, winner and runner-up of the Collins Cup, had already snubbed them back then. One year later, only one of these world champions (Lucy Charles-Barclay) remained, and her priorities were very clearly elsewhere. Or look at Taylor Knibb, the start of the 2024 T100 World Tour. She took up another T100 contract for 2025, but treated is as of so little importance that she didn’t even bother to fulfil the terms of her contract, because she was so focused on Ironman and Ironman 70.3 worlds instead.
But the PTO were clearly not satisfied with their niche being where short-course athletes go who are looking to get into long-course triathlon. That they ditched the system of contracted athletes for 2026 completely is very obviously a response to the fact that T100 kept hemorrhaging its top talent to Ironman. Incidentally, such drastic changes after only two years are not the kind of behaviour which one usually associates with somebody who has found a winning formula and is using it as a basis for sustainable further growth. Rather, it feels more like throwing things at the wall in the hope that something will stick before their investors run out of patience.
No offence, but it feels as if you’re projecting your own enthusiasm for triathlon on everybody else. Time trialling is the least exciting format of road cycling, and the platonic ideal of the longest part of non-drafting triathlon is a parallel time trial. And one which is far longer than any pure road cycling ITT, even for middle-distance triathlons. On top of that, compared to road cycling, triathlon is an even more niche sport. And it gets even worse, when you likely won’t even have the best in that discipline at the Olympics. People might tune in to see Remco Evenepoel overtake Tadej Pogačar in a standalone time trial. That doesn’t mean they will watch four hours of triathletes spinning their legs whose names they’ve never heard before.
Also, realistically, it wouldn’t be the same group of athletes racing both races, even if you didn’t add additional qualification spots. Non-drafting long-course and draft-legal short-course triathlon are sufficiently different enough, that athletes and national federation would have to choose between focusing on one or the other to specialize in. That effect can already be partially seen with the MTR, with federations not necessarily choosing their best individual short-course athletes, but selecting their athletes for the Olympics with one eye on who could be part of a successful MTR team. Adding another, long-course triathlon event to the Olympics without additional spots would almost certainly result in a further dilution of fields across the different disciplines, and not in the best athletes battling each other in two different race formats.
All in all, it’s really not a proposal which will look very attractive from the IOC’s POV. The only realistic way to get long-course triathlon added to the Olympics is probably finding somebody who is willing to ‘bribe’ the IOC with an ungodly amount of money to include it. And I’m not seeing that somebody appearing anywhere anytime soon.
Maybe they use the opportunity to keep the Challenge brand and ditch ‘T100’ instead, along with the latter’s limitation to a specific format. Then they wouldn’t have to go through such ridiculous contortions as trying to rebrand the Olympic distance to T50, despite it not being 50 km. 
(Don’t hold your breath for it, though.)
All the reasons why draft-legal short course was chosen over non-drafting triathlon in the 1990s hold even more weight today than they did back then. Not to mention that after 30 years, draft-legal triathlon has developed its own vested interests groups which would fiercely resist such a change. Elite short-course racing switching to non-drafting won’t happen.
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