3 Takeaways from WTCS Weihai
Beth Potter takes her second WTCS title of the year in Weihai. Photo: World Triathlon
The last World Triathlon Championship Series (WTCS) race before the Championship Finals in Wollongong, Australia next month saw Great Britain’s Beth Potter surge into a tie for first in the Series with Olympic champion Cassandre Beaugrand, setting up a winner-take-all showdown for the world title. Switzerland’s Max Studer took his first WTCS win, a nice follow to his European title earned in Budapest at the end of August.
Here are a few takeaways from the day’s racing in China:
Potter Peaking at the Right Time
Today’s win signalled that the 2016 track and field Olympian (she ran the 10,000 m in Rio) will head into the finals in Australia with lots of confidence in her run. Less than two weeks ago she overcame a deficit of about a minute to run down American Taylor Spivey, and today she ran away from Germany’s Lisa Tertsch and Tanya Neubert.
“I’m just thinking about myself, about my race processes and I’m really happy with that,” Potter told World Triathlon after the race. “I don’t take winning for granted so it’s great to back up my win in Karlovy just 12 days later. I don’t think I was lower than third wheel most of the bike and spent a lot of time on the front, so I am happy to be able to run well of that. I’m feeling quietly confident and good in myself, trusting the training and it’s coming good.”
With roughly a month to go before the race in Wollongong, things are set for a showdown between her and Olympic gold medalist (and defending world champion) Beaugrand, who wasn’t competing at either of the last two WTCS events. The Frenchwoman won the Alghero and French Riviera WTCS events earlier this year to go along with her runner-up finish in Hamburg. Potter was eighth in Alghero, third in Hamburg and fifth at the French Riviera event, so Beaugrand has the upper hand in head-to-head racing, but Potter definitely appears to be building her season really well heading into the final.
One would have to mark Beaugrand down as the prohibitive favourite for the world title, but Potter’s recent successes do bode well to at least keep things exciting.
Desirae Ridenour’s Comeback Continues
Desirae Ridenour. Photo: World Triathlon
Competing in her first “standard” distance race (yeah, most of us just call it Olympic-distance), Canadian Desirae Ridenour continued her impressive season, finishing eighth.
I first saw Ridenour racing at the Triathlon Canada National Junior Championships in Ottawa in 2016 where she glided through the run to win by over a minute over Hannah Henry, who would take the USAT Collegiate National Championship the following year. Over the next few years she would earn a number of junior titles and was selected, while still a junior, to race at the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in 2018, where she finished 17th in the individual race and was part of Canada’s fourth-place mixed relay team. Many of us in the coaching community felt she was being pushed into that kind of competition too early. Ridenour continued to race a lot over the next couple of years, but appeared to be struggling. As COVID stopped racing around the world, she disappeared from the triathlon scene for a few years.
“I think during that time, there was a lot of pressure,” she told World Triathlon in a story posted earlier this year. “The coach I had at the time, I think they saw a lot of potential in me, and I think they kind of pushed me into a lot of higher level racing. So, I think I skipped quite a few levels. I just felt a lot of pressure to perform, even though I was a junior and no one expected anything of me.”
“I was really struggling in the sport,” she continued. “I think there were times I was like, ‘I don’t know if I want to do this anymore’.”
Ridenour switched coaches and now spends much of the year training in New Zealand.
“I think the change has helped immensely in this success that I’ve been seeing so far,” she added.
Calling this season a “comeback” probably isn’t an accurate description since she returned to racing in 2023, and she won last year’s national championships here in Canada. Despite the fact that she still isn’t doing as much running as many of her competitors, 2025 has been a breakout year. She started things off with a bang, taking the World Triathlon Cup Napier. She also took second at the Europe Triathlon Premium Cup Holten, and won the Americas Triathlon Cup events in Montreal and Kelowna.
In Weihai Ridenour was first out on to the run course and led the race for roughly a kilometre of the run. While her 34:55 run split was roughly 90 seconds slower than Potter’s, today’s finish was an impressive debut over the distance.
If Ridenour can continue her (apparently) patient build back to peak running fitness, one would imagine she’ll be in line to represent Canada in LA in 2028.
Those Last Ditch Breakaways Can Work Out
Austria’s Tjebbe Kaindl and Switzerland’s Max Studer enter T2 together. Photo: World Triathlon
At the end of the seventh of eight laps on the bike, the lead group included 18 men who were within four seconds of each other. During the final lap, Austria’s Tjebbe Kaindl went for broke on a technical section, taking Max Studer along with him. Pre-race favourite Henry Graf was eventually able to jump on, as was American Darr Smith, although Kaindl and Studer would eventually open up a bit of a gap (three to five seconds) heading into transition. The rest of the lead group would arrive between 25 and 29 seconds later, with the chase group finally hitting transition 1:21 behind.
Studer would take that lead and build on it, eventually running well clear to take the win by 24 seconds over Graf, with American John Reed managing to overcome his 30-second deficit to catch up to Graf, but the German managed to pull away on a downhill, which meant Reed would round out the podium.
“The breakaway at the end worked out, and I knew that to get a little head start and have the transition all to ourselves with no people around would be great,” Studer told World Triathlon after the race. “I was even able to extend the lead on the run, so really happy.”
Photo: World Triathlon
Graf will head into the finals in fourth-place in the overall standings, but everyone is well behind Aussie Matthew Hauser, who’s three WTCS wins this year (Yokohama, Hamburg and French Riviera) mean he’s sitting on a perfect 3,000 points. Hauser is 220 points up on Brazil’s Miguel Hidalgo, who is only five points ahead of Portugal’s Vasco Vilaca.
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