Henri Schoeman and Zsanett Bragmayer just won the SLT Arena Games Sursee. Those were nice wins, but at the same time it was clear that Super League Triathlon seems to have more and more trouble attracting the real top athletes to race their Arena Games. Many young, somewhat more unknown athletes started today, whereas previously the SLT races were invariably raced by the very best top athletes.
The Super League Triathlon Arena Games Finals consisted of three heats in different sequences. The swim was over 200 meters, the bike over 4 kilometers and the run over one kilometer. The time differences created in the first two heats were used to determine the starting position for the third and decisive heat. In it, the athletes started based on that time difference: the fastest athletes were allowed to leave first, and then the remaining athletes had to wait out their gap in time before being allowed to chase.
In the women’s event, it was Bragmayer who was supreme from the start; she won all three heats and thus quickly secured her victory. Second was Olivia Mathias, who eventually crossed the finish line 22 seconds after Bragmayer. Biggest surprise of the race was the only 15-year-old Fanni Szalai; she was very strong and eventually ran to a nice third place and at the same time she was less than only one second behind Mathias.
In the men’s race, several men alternated individual wins per heat, but in the end it was Henri Schoeman who secured the overall victory. It still got pretty exciting though, as his lead over Maxime Hueber-Moosbrugger was only 8 seconds in the end. Two seconds behind, Simon Westermann took the bronze.
