The Professional Triathletes Organisation (PTO) has been active on social media over the last few days hinting that we can look forward to a new “PTO Tour” starting next year which will include “the greatest athletes on the planet, million dollar prize purses and global broadcast” according to the PTO website.
We can look forward to a Canadian Open and an American Open next year, along with the second running of the Collins Cup, with the Asian Open and European Open coming in 2023. While there’s not much details as of yet on dates or venues, the PTO says it will offer age group racing in 2022, too.
The format for the PTO Tour events (Canadian Open and American Open) for next year appear to be following a similar format to the PTO 2020 Championship that was held as part of Challenge Daytona last year. One would imagine that the age group events will now be put on by the PTO as part of the weekend’s activities, rather than being hosted by another entity, as Challenge North America did in Daytona last year, for example.
It is hard not to argue that both the PTO 2020 Championship and the Collins Cup were successful events, setting the PTO up well for this new “Tour” offering in 2022 and 2023. What will be more interesting, though, is how the PTO juggles the scheduling of the events with two Ironman World Championships on the calendar (St. George, Utah in May and Kailua-Kona, Hawaii in October) and the Ironman 70.3 World Championship in St. George at the end of October.
Triathlon fans will look forward to all those details. For now we’ll leave you with this video posted on Facebook teasing the upcoming series:
