124 yards, 831.5 kilometers: that is the total number of loops and corresponding distance recorded by Belgians Merijn Geerts and Ivo Steyaert at the 2026 Backyard Ultra World Championship. With this feat, the two men achieved the longest distance ever recorded in the event. The record had previously been sharpened to 123 yards on July 1, which the Belgians surpassed by one 6.7056-kilometer loop.
Remarkably, Geerts and Steyaert were not crowned world champions—that honor went to the American participants. Because the event was a national team world championship, the results of all participants were added together, bringing the USA to a total of 1,120 yards. Australia finished second with a total of 1,069 completed yards, and Belgium took third with 1,058 yards.
*This article is very brief – Triathlon Today was down for a week and a half following the global PHP vulnerability. Purely for the sake of completeness, we chose to publish this article anyway, albeit much later and far less extensively than usual.
