Jeanne Lehair Overcomes Challenging Toulouse History to Win Supertri Title

It wasn’t as though Jeanne Lehair has always had bad luck at the Supertri event in Toulouse. The first year she competed there, in 2022, she actually won a short chute for her team and took sixth in the race. The following year, though, she ended up getting DQ’d for a helmet violation. Then, last year, a flat sidelined her day.

All of which made for an interesting challenge for the athlete who was originally from France but moved to Luxembourg a few years ago in time to represent that country at last year’s Olympics. (Where she also had some bad luck with a crash on the wet roads.)

“With the DQ and last year the puncture, I just hope this year I can at least finish the race,” Lehair said in an interview earlier this week. “But I don’t wish for luck, but at least if I cannot have bad luck that will be great.”

She’s handled the disappointment, both in Toulouse and at the Olympics in Paris, in style, though, as she bounced back in 2025 to enjoy a stellar year that’s included her first World Triathlon Championship Series (WTCS) win and, now, finally, the overall Supertri title that has eluded her for so many years. (She finished second overall in 2023 and 2024.) That resilience stems, in many ways, from seeing how disappointed so many of her training partners were after the Tokyo Games.

“I saw so many of my friends with who I was training with – I think of the eight girls who went to Tokyo, only one was happy,” she remembered. “And so I was like, I don’t want to be like that …”

Lehair credits looking forward to last year’s Supertri race in Boston just a few weeks after the Olympics as one of the ways she dealt with the disappointment of the DNF in front of so many of her family and friends.

“It was a Supertri race two weeks after in Boston that I won, so I guess, for this race, I was competing with a bit with a revenge in my body,” she said.

The Supertri success no-doubt provided some of the confidence that helped Lehair achieve her main goal for 2025 – to make a WTCS podium – at her second race of the year in Yokohama. She also took second at WTCS French Riviera and an impressive fourth (after a crash on the bike) in Karlovy Vari.

After winning in Chicgago and Jersey, Lehair was in the driver’s seat coming into the Supertri finale in Toulouse, but could still lose if Léonie Périault beat her, or if Georgia Taylor-Brown could take the win and Lehair finished a few spots back. In the end, though, Lehair left nothing to chance, easily running away from the field to finish well ahead of Périault (even without using the short chute her team had earned) and ensure she would be the overall champion ahead of her teammate on the Podium Racing Team. Britain’s Jess Fullagar was an excited third-place finisher, with Georgia Taylor-Brown taking fourth, which was enough to net her third overall in the series standings.

Lehair and Périault’s success this season helped catapult Podium racing to the Supertri League team title.

Full results are available here.

Adding to the big day for Lehair, after the podium ceremony her partner, pro triathlete Nathan Lessman (FRA), proposed.

Photo: Supertri

Lehmann Tops Men’s Series With Another Win

Photo: Supertri

Supertri rookie Csongor Lehmann (HUN) proved today that the high-intensity Supertri racing suits him perfectly. After taking second to Alex Yee in his first Supetri race in Chicago, Lehmann won in Jersey, setting up a run for the overall title.

Like Lehair, Lehmann has also enjoyed WTCS success this year with a third-place finish in Karlovy Vari before the Jersey win. With the WTCS final in Wollongong the highlight of his 2025 calendar, he was still training at altitude when we caught up with him last week. According to Lehmann, the Supertri racing serves as excellent preparation for the WTCS events.

“I think it helps a lot,” he said. “It helps me to get back in race shape, not just physically, but mentally as well because these Supertri races have three triathlons continuously and you can’t make any mistakes. So I think this is the best preparation.”

For Lehmann the Supertri events aren’t just a way to prepare for WTCS racing – he’s really enjoying the racing.

“It’s like the cherry on top in triathlon – it’s so intense, it’s so brutal and so cruel,” he said. “You need to be 100 percent on the whole race.”

Lehmann, who is part of the Stars and Stripes Team, was certainly on his game today as he worked with teammate Seth Rider (USA) to pull clear during the bike and easily hold off Portugal’s Vasco Vilaca. Vilaca’s third today was enough to net him second overall in the series, with Ricardo Battista finishing fourth, and rounding out the series podium.

“I’m almost speechless, it was crazy from the very beginning,” Lehmann said after the race. “I was working perfectly with Seth on the swim, bike and run – it was just a dream team. And this is like a dream coming true for me. It was a really tough race today and we pushed so hard on the first run to create a gap in front of the other guys and from there we pushed all the way until the end. Stars & Stripes was rocking today!”

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