She was seen as the biggest favorite and she has lived up to that role: on home soil, Cassandre Beaugrand has just won the Olympic Triathlon. The French athlete won after a stunning duel with Julie Derron, Beth Potter and Emma Lombardi.
Only last night came the final green light that the race could take place, including a swim in the Seine, and so the women dove into the water at eight o’clock in the morning. The current was strong, but it couldn’t bother defending champion Flora Duffy: she took the lead and made the first differences in the water.
In the last few hundred meters of the swim, Duffy even got loose and as a result she also started the bike leg on her own. That bike leg was defined by dozens of crashes, with one woman after another crashing nasty: the roads were so slippery that parts of the course were actually barely safe to ride.
After leading solo for about ten kilometers, Duffy dropped back into a chasing group anyway. This created a group of ten women in the lead, which also included Beth Potter, Cassandre Beaugrand, Maya Kingma, Georgia Taylor-Brown, Julie Derron, Emma Lombardi, Laura Lindemann, Taylor Spivey and Zsanett Kuttor-Bragmayer. This group worked well together and did not let a chasing pack get any closer than eventually one minute. A crash by Lindemann did thin the leading group to nine women just before the 10-kilometer run began.
There it was the Swiss Derron who, after a quick transition, took the lead. That was surprising, because beforehand she was not seen as the biggest favorite, but thanks to her very fast pace women like Spivey and Kuttor-Bragmayer had to let go first, then Duffy and Kingma had to drop off as well, and even Taylor-Brown could not keep up shortly afterwards. Four women remained in the lead: Derron, Beaugrand, Potter and Lombardi.
Derron kept up the pace until the last lap. Then suddenly it was Beaugrand who accelerated and managed to get away from her three pursuers. In the end, she ran to a spectacular victory in 1:54:55. Derron finished second at six seconds and Potter third at 15 seconds. Lombardi just missed the podium a few seconds later.
