In a rainy Munich, Georgia Taylor-Brown proved to be way too strong and won the Super League Triathlon Championship Series Munich by a wide margin. The British athlete led from start to finish and was inimitable.
In Munich athletes raced according to the ‘Enduro format’, where all athletes had to swim 300 meters, bike 4 kilometers, run 1.6 kilometers and then that mini-triathlon had to be completed three times in a row – without any rest in between the sessions. If you found yourself more than a minute and a half behind the leader, a ‘disqualification’ followed.
Heat 1:
It was France’s Cassandre Beaugrand, last week’s winner in London, who led the swim and came back from the water well within four minutes. However, thanks to good transitions it was Sian Rainsley and Georgia Taylor Brown who took the lead on the bike, while Beaugrand quickly lost connection with everyone and was therefore surprisingly an athlete fighting to keep within the 90 seconds. At the same time, Rainsley did not manage to keep up with Taylor-Brown and so it was the British top athlete who dominated the first heat: nothing changed about that during the run either.
Heat 2:
When Taylor-Brown dove into the water for her second swim, she already had an impressive lead of over twenty seconds over Taylor Spivey, Beth Potter, Sophie Coldwell and Rainsley. Behind them followed a larger group, more than thirty seconds behind.
In the water, Taylor-Brown did lose some of her lead as the chasing trio came back into the TA with only fourteen seconds remaining. A trio indeed, because Potter lost the connection to the chasing group and thus fell back to the group behind.
It was clear that Taylor-Brown was particularly strong, because even though she lost some of her lead in the water, it was exactly the other way around during the bike and the run. Even though the differences were relatively small – quite logical on these ultra short distances – the lead at the end of the second heat had increased to almost twenty seconds. Rainsley had already had to let go Coldwell and Spivey by then and so at that point there seemed to be three women really fighting for the podium places.
Heat 3:
In the third heat, there was no real question about who was to take the victory anymore, because Taylor-Brown did not let the two chasing ladies come closer. That battle for the silver and bronze between Spivey and Coldwell became exciting even more, because both ladies did not give each other a break at all.
In the end, Taylor-Brown ran totally in control to victory. The battle between Spivey and Coldwell was decided in the very last meters. In an ultimate final sprint, it was Coldwell who finished second, thus allowing Spivey to claim the bronze.
