In a race in which many big names were missing, but just as well a number of world-class competitors were at the start, Lisa Tertsch has just won WTCS Abu Dhabi. Spectators were treated to an opening race that immediately became exciting until the last meters, with a full German podium.
The 2025 season started off spectacularly with something you never really see in a WTCS, and certainly not at a Sprint Distance: two athletes swam so fast that they soon managed to break away from the large group. This was mainly thanks to Italy’s Bianca Seregni, who started so energetically that no one could follow her, except for Belgium’s Jolien Vermeylen, creating a leading duo even halfway through the 750-meter swim. During the second half of the swim, in water as flat as possible, their lead only increased. Both athletes climbed ashore after just under nine minutes and then had a twenty-second gap on the large group.
Then it was a change of pace for the athletes who had already started in Abu Dhabi, because for the first time in years there was no biking – nor running – on the world-famous F1 circuit. What followed were five short 4-kilometer bike laps on still beautifully constructed roads, and it took only a kilometer before Seregni and Vermeylen were already caught back by the chasing peloton.
Halfway through the bike leg, Britain’s Kate Waugh placed an attack and even though she got a few meters loose and other women had to let go because of that increase of speed, she soon found out that biking against an unleashed peloton makes little sense. Still, everyone was warned; there was no time to take it easy and the race was clearly on edge.
Still, the group stayed together in the final kilometers of the bike leg and so all these women started the final five kilometers of running at the same time. Lisa Tertsch had the fastest transition and immediately grabbed the lead in the first meters of the run, but the other ladies followed in a long line. One of those ladies was Waugh and after only two hundred meters the British passed Tertsch, to set the pace from then on. Even that didn’t go convincingly enough, as a leading group of ten women emerged – including, in addition to Tertsch and Waugh, Jeanne Lehair, Nina Eim, Leonie Periault, Laura Lindemann, Tanja Neubert and also Vermeylen and Seregni – looking at each other and no one seemed to want to make the first serious move.
Halfway the run it was clear that the French Periault was making the first serious moves; the pace was increased considerably and only three German ladies were able to keep up with her: Eim, Tertsch and Lindemann. As if Periault had not already hurt the ladies enough, she accelerated once more with about two kilometers to go, and again her German competitors had to pull out all the stops to go with her.
As with the first acceleration, Eim, Tertsch and Lindemann were not destroyed and so the leading group of four women headed to the finish line together, incidentally at an ever-increasing pace and so the tension became more and more palpable. In the end it was a sprint for victory, with Eim in particular pulling a face as if she could drop dead at any moment, and it was Tertsch who ran away with a beautiful victory. She won the race in 54:29, followed by Eim at 1 second and Lindemann in third position at 2 seconds.
