Lukas Verzbicas made good on his promise to his best friend, Kevin McDowell by winning the junior boys world championship in a convincing fashion. Tony Smorgawiecz overcame a 40 second deficit to the lead group of 8 going into the run to grab the bronze. Ben Kanute held on for a 13th place finish.
Outstanding effort by all athletes.
good work…
Love it! Hopefully US media picks this up - good stories need to be heard. Let’s hope we keep hearing from all these young men.
Lukas Verzbicas made good on his promise to his best friend, Kevin McDowell by winning the junior boys world championship in a convincing fashion. Tony Smorgawiecz overcame a 40 second deficit to the lead group of 8 going into the run to grab the bronze. Ben Kanute held on for a 13th place finish.
Outstanding effort by all athletes.
Congrats to the great performances by all the US junior boys. A super special congrats to Tony Smorageiwicz as he’s a local South Dakota Quarq sponsored athlete. Lots of fun to see him grow from the small local tri scene to 3rd at worlds! We think there are big things to come from him in the future.
Mieke
Quarq Technology
So what’s the recap of the top US guys.
LV is going to run at Oregon (xc/track). What’s the status on the 3rd and 13th place guys?
Tony(3rd still in hs) Ben Kanute(13th) is attending arizona with the triathlon team.
Is college nat’s draft legal yet?
I believe that Tony (3rd) is still a high school student from S.D. and Ben (13th) is from Geneva IL, and races triathlon for AZ
Edit: Ahh CJ beat me to it! No unfortunantly College nats is not draft legal yet! It will be interesting to watch Ben race there though, as he is an extremely strong cyclist, which may suit him better there!
What an amazing story – it should be an ABC Family movie or something! Huge congrats to Multisport Madness on pulling it all together this season.
Two American Juniors on the podium and our YOG Silver medalist sitting out – that’s a reason to be excited for the future!
Not yet, but they might be going in that direction in 2-3 years. Too bad for the strong bikers. Guys like Verzbicas seem unbeatable at draft-legal events. He ran a sub-4 min mile in a high school event not too long ago. Simply incredible talent.
As much as I would like to believe that collegiate tri would head toward “draft-legal”, I don’t see it happening anytime soon. One of the “requirements” for draft-legal is a closed bike course; unless they find a way around that, too may events would be eliminated from the pool of races. Now you’d have a mix of traditional and draft-legal races; which “version” is Nationals?
I’m not saying it won’t happen, but that is a fairly significant change which means that it will take a while.
The age group race at Clermont required a basic “skills” teaching session of all the participants.
There is another post about the number 13 …WOW!!
Very interesting, I was not aware of the closed course requirement. Thanks for the info!
I’ve not seen that “rule” in writing but I can’t recall any exceptions in the races I’ve been at. It seems to make sense in terms of safety.
Lukas basically soloed at Nationals on the bike. He did not make the front pack coming out of the swim and was in “no man’s land” on the bike (between packs). He had a pretty good bike split even though he did not have a pack to work with.
bnhsdad is right, Lukas can swim and bike better than he is often given credit for. I have broken away with just him before and we had no problem staying ahead of a field of local Cat 2-3-4 cyclists, and he definitely did more of the work! But Ben is even stronger on the bike, so I think he will be someone to watch for at this years collegiate nats.
Although I am sure we will see his name on the world running stage, it is kind of a shame to see him leave triathlon now. Hopefully he will return- looks like the makings of the next great champion.
Ben is attending the same university as me and i’ll be looking forward to training with him! Sure got lots of talent this year.