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Olympian and World Champion Andy Potts “Officially” Retires from Racing

Photo: Eric Wynn

He’s one of a select few who have won at the highest levels of draft-legal racing and also an IRONMAN. Throw in the fact that he also won an IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship, and the list of his peers becomes even more exclusive. Consider that he was still winning pro races at 45, and you see why Andy Potts retires from competitive triathlon racing with legendary status.

Potts’ international racing career started in 1993 and saw him earn podium finishes on five continents. He raced in the Olympics and the Paralympics, along with 23 world championships. His storied career included more than 60 professional and elite titles including: eight IRONMAN wins, 32 half-distance victories, six Escape from Alcatraz titles, and two World Cup wins. He won the Pan Am Games in 2007, the same year he took the IRONMAN 70.3 world title. He finished in the top-10 in Kona seven times and was fourth twice. And, in case you’re wondering why he got so much coverage at events, he was first out of the water in almost 90 percent of the races he competed in.

Photo: Eric Wynn

Swimming Background

Long renowned as one of the sport’s premier swimmers, Potts came by his prowess leading into T1 honestly. His first international podium came at a swimming event in Paris in 1994, where he won the 200 and 400 IM races, along with the 1,500 m free. Two years later he would finish fourth in the 400 IM at the Olympic trials – his fellow University of Michigan teammates, Tom Dolan and Eric Namesnik, would go on to take the gold and silver medals at the 1996 Atlanta Games.

After his university swim career came to an end in 1999, Potts would run track for Michigan in 2000 as a walk-on.

“Why are you letting a swimmer beat you,” Potts ribbed any of the team members he managed to outrun that year.

After a “small hiatus” from sports, Potts made the seemingly logical step to triathlon in the fall of 2002, and it wasn’t long before he was excelling in his new athletic endeavor. He qualified for the 2004 Athens Games, and in 2006 finished third in the overall World Cup rankings (what we now know as the World Triathlon Championship Series). Despite that success, Potts was starting to realize that draft-legal racing might not be his best triathlon event. He cites the World Cup race in Cornerbrook, Newfoundland, Canada as a great example of what he was going through – he often felt like he was the best “triathlete” in a draft-legal race, but that wasn’t enough to get him the win.

“I broke away in the swim, only to get caught on the bike,” he remembered. “I managed to break away on the bike, but then got caught on the run by Javier Gomez, Simon Whitfield and Chris Gemmell and would finish fourth. ‘What else do I have to do,’ I thought to myself. The writing was on the wall – my skill set might be towards non-drafting.”

Photo: Eric Wynn

A year later he would prove himself prescient as he sprinted past Argentina’s Oscar Galindez in a dramatic finish in Clearwater, taking the 70.3 world title. He continued to compete in draft-legal races for a few more years, but by 2008 he was on the start line in Kona, where he would make his IRONMAN debut with an impressive seventh-place finish. It was the beginning of a long-string of Kona success which was somewhat ironic considering that Potts hadn’t started the sport, like so many do, with dreams of success on the Big Island.

“When I first started doing triathlon, my mindset was ‘who wants to do anything for eight hours,'” he laughs. “As I got more exposed to long-distance sports, I kept wondering what humans can do.”

Curiousity

It’s that “wondering” that has driven so much of Potts’ career, and kept him competing for so long.

“I love triathlon and I love the opportunity to see what’s possible,” Potts said. “I wanted to know, can we do this? Can humans continue to be at a peak, aerobic, world-class level into their 40s? I was willing to find out by putting in the work.”

In addition to doing the work, Potts also set extremely high standards for himself, so that what others would see as huge success, for him was a level of failure. He acknowledges, though, that his use of the word “failure” needs to be quantified.

Photo: Eric Wynn

“The game changes with Father Time, and it’s hard to continue to risk and fail when you’ve done some special things,” he said. His version of “failure” involves being willing to “take a risk in your preparation and set a high bar and not achieve it.”

“If you’re continually curious you can do amazing things,” he continued.

Potts also has an excellent ability to turn challenges into opportunities. After helping the American triathlon team qualify three athletes for the 2008 Games in Beijing, Potts finished second to three different people in the three American Olympic qualifying races. Instead of competing in his second Games, he was the alternate.

“Every success, setback and turn in circumstances offered me an opportunity,” Potts said. “Luckily enough for me, I always had great coaching, council and friendship from brilliant people I trusted to guide me along the way.”

That guidance would lead him to Kona that year. Thirteen years later, Potts would grab another opportunity and guide American Kyle Coon to a fifth-place finish at the Tokyo Paralympic Games. In between there were all those full- and half-distance wins, not to mention the regular appearances at the front of any race he entered. Along the way he and wife Lisa have brought up their children Boston and Sloane, too.

Desi Linden and Andy Potts. Photo: Eric Wynn

Opening a New Door

Potts’ last win came at IRONMAN 70.3 Ecuador in 2022 (he would turn 46 at the end of that year) and, in 2023, he raced three times. He didn’t compete at all in 2024.

“It is time for me to officially retire from professional racing and open a new door to an opportunity that has knocked too loudly to ignore any longer,” the 48-year-old said. “I have cherished every moment of victory and defeat, and none of it would have been possible without the support I received along the way.”

We’ll have to wait to find out what that “opportunity” is, but you can be sure that Andy Potts will be taking it on with the gusto, determination, drive and the class that has made him a consummate pro for so many years.

Photo: Eric Wynn

Tags:

Andy PottsIRONMAN 70.3 World ChampionshipKonaOlympics

Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for kajet kajet says:

    Excellent article! would be excellent if it weren’t for the glaring omission of Andy’s self-assigned title of the Muffin Man (see 1:17)

  2. Avatar for david david says:

    True gentleman and one of the greatest! great article. Kudos to to Andy!

  3. Yes I have met him and he was very generous with his time and advise. A real star!!!

  4. Nice article for a very nice guy. Always pulled for him to win. Hope he finds success in retirement and at almost 50 - not long to go to Social Security :slight_smile:

  5. The next opportunity is he is going to be resident head coach at the OTC for US Paratriathlon resident team in Colorado Springs (USAT announced it a few days ago on the socials).

  6. It has been an honor to race alongside Andy for so many years and then support his last victories with Dimond Bikes. He is an absolute legend of the sport.

  7. Thanks for this write up . I did not realize that Andy was 4th in the 400IM trials for Atlanta Olympics (any other country and he is in the Olympic finals) and he walked on to track at Michigan!!!

    Here is my Andy Potts story. I was talking to him and a few others after St. Croix 70.3 in 2012. All the buzz before the race was about Lance and even though Andy dusted Lance (Lance was 7th), everyone was buzzing around Lance, so Andy was just hanging out in transition like a “regular guy” with a group of “regular age grouper”. So one of the girls asks Andy, “you swim so fast what do I need to do to improve my swimming”. To which I jumped in and answered, “Andy will tell you the hard truth that you have to swim 75,000m per week for ever and and day”…to which Andy in his humble was replied with, “Pretty well what he said”.

    @ericmulk now we have to do the Andy Potts approved swim week!!!

  8. I believe Lance was 3’rd and it was Andy’s consistency (2’nd S, 2nd B and 2’nd R) that got him the win, with him making the pass on the run for the win.

  9. He also placed 9th in the 1500m in 15:38. The lack of any detail on his pre-tri swimming career was my only slight criticism of this article. The author could elaborated on the “he came to his swimming prowess honestly…” by saying he swam roughly 70-80,000 yd/m per week from age 10 to age 22. It was cool though that you made that comment to Andy and he agreed with you to that girl at St Croix. I hope she took this advice to heart. No shortcuts in swimming. :slight_smile:

  10. Thanks for jotting my memory. You are correct. I believe Lance was 7th at Galveston 70.3 (Kienle outbiked him), then 3rd in St. Croix, then 1st in Florida 70.3 then first at Honu 70.3 then Lance was in the competition penalty box from then onwards

  11. @ericmulk the funny part of that discussion of a random fellow age grouper asking Andy for advice on how to improve swimming and my equally jackass answer was that I gave this before I kind of got more into swimming, but the answer is the same in all sports. Volume rules. Swimmers just learn that out of the gate, but if you hung around single sport cyclists or runners, it is roughly the same answer. In my other sport XC skiing, it is not clearcut in terms of hours on skis. Rather its that magical 1000 hrs training year that coaches would use, because by definition you can’t be on snow for 6-8 months per year, and as soon as it is on snow you’re in competition season, so a lot of it is around annual volume (oh wait, this sounds like the Norwegian method).

    Back to Andy after that he said, something along the lines of “people think I have some magic leg up in swimming but it just came along from the yardage that went in”

  12. Avatar for DAC1 DAC1 says:

    Met him at IM Lake Placid. A true star and very generous with his time.

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