The Weihai Wave

We have been very lucky at Trisutto to experience some great sporting moments. However, the overwhelming emotion after a huge build-up and win can often be one of sheer relief.

Breakthrough races like this past weekend in Weihai can feel different. There is a joy in seeing an athlete finally produce in competition what you have been watching daily in training and show the world a new destiny.

Alanis Siffert winning Challenge Roth a few weeks ago was one of those days.

Individual breakthrough moments are rare. Having a whole team break through on the same weekend, like we saw in Weihai? That is something very special indeed.

MAX IS BACK

Watching Max Studer win in Weihai should give everybody in our Trisutto community a tremendous sense of pride. We have watched him grow enormously, both as an athlete and as a man, over the past nine years. Max arrived in the squad as an erratic Swiss C-Kader junior. Plenty of speed, plenty of talent, but big question marks over whether he possessed the discipline, strength and consistency required to become genuinely world class.

Those questions were answered years ago.

He has transformed himself into a double Olympian, a European Champion and Switzerland's dominant male triathlete of this decade. However, the composure and race awareness he showed in Weihai, taking victory despite still being some way from his best physical condition, represented another step forward.

That is a credit to Max and the years of work he has been prepared to put in. Pound for pound, he has long belonged in the conversation with the quickest runners in the sport. There was, however, always one weakness preventing him from consistently using that weapon at the very highest level.

The swim.

Now, after paying the price of thousands and thousands of kilometres with the swim band, he is receiving the rewards. Whenever Max can get out of the water only 13 seconds behind the front of the race, suddenly everybody else has a problem. So it was in Weihai, where he remained composed through a wet bike leg before delivering the fastest run of the day, 29:24, to defend his Weihai title in 1:41:08.

This year has again been anything but straightforward. He has overcome plenty of adversity and proven once more that, if healthy, he can hold his own against anybody in the world. Well done, Max. We are very proud.

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THE CHINESE WAVE

If Max was a spark, the Chinese National Team was a fire, producing its strongest collective WTCS performance.

Huang Anqi, our Mighty Mouse, finished fourth in her first-ever WTCS race. Lin Xinyu finished ninth, her first WTCS top ten. In the men's race, 21-year-old Zhang Xirui finished 16th, while Fan Junjie came home 24th. Our junior athletes all completed the race in commendable form.

A four-year overnight success!

Four years of goggles falling off in the swim.

Four years of not being able to get the bike shoes on.

Four years of going the wrong way on the final lap of the run.

An end of an era, with four frustrating years of watching our inexperienced athletes show things in training that they could not reproduce when the gun went off finally coming to an end.

Julie Derron summed it up beautifully in her message to the team afterwards:

“Congratulations to the team in Weihai. It is very satisfying to see you translate the potential you show in training into the races. I hope this shows everyone that Chinese triathletes belong among the best in the world. Well done!”

So how did it happen? A lot of things came together, but one moment that changed the psychology of this team came during the men's race.

Chen Rongheng, ranked 191st in the world, weighing 52 kilograms, rode himself into the front group and, at one point, took his turn at the front of a WTCS race.

Insignificant? No. Seeing their diminutive teammate prepared to actually race the WTCS stars they look up to, rather than simply participate alongside them, gave our younger men permission to do exactly the same.

For several years, our young men have looked much like the erratic C-Kader juniors we described with Max. In Weihai, they grew up. Zhang Xirui, 21, crossed the line 16th in only the fourth Olympic-distance race he has ever completed. Fan Junjie, 24, made the main pack, stayed solid all day and finished 24th. It was a great job.

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In the women's race, our 24 year-olds veteran Lin Xinyu and Mighty Mouse, Huang Anqi, adopted exactly the same attitude. They rode themselves into the front pack and found themselves running shoulder-to-shoulder with one of the great legends of our sport, Gwen Jorgensen.

What is the greatest respect you can show to a great champion?

Go after them, the same way they did to a generation athletes before.

Anqi produced the fourth-fastest run of the day to finish fourth. Lin, who has carried the Chinese National Team internationally for years, produced her best-ever WTCS result to finish ninth and record her first top ten.

Two Chinese women in the top nine of a World Championship Series race.

That sentence would have sounded laughable not very long ago. Except no one will be laughing anymore.

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Is this the start of a great Chinese wave?

Not yet. Anqi had some good fortune. Race dynamics allowed the two chase groups to reconnect. The Chinese team is still young and inexperienced at this level, and one race doesn't suddenly solve everything we have been working on for four years. The ups and downs will continue. What Weihai did was something more important. It proved to the athletes themselves that the ceiling they imagined above their heads wasn't really there.

We won't get carried away.

But is the future bright? You bet it is.