Tomorrow the worlds best off road triathletes take on what will be the last open full distance race of the inaugural XTERRA World Cup series. The final of the series will be the XTERRA World Championship in Italy on September 23 2023.
The new series features 12 races to earn points, including 7 full distance races, 5 short track events, and then the final event, the World Championship. This new format allows professional athletes to compete for the World Cup Championship Title while athletes can still claim individual country top rankings. And now all prize money bonuses are centered around the series.
To compete in the series, athletes are required to choose 4 full distance events and 3 short tracks to tally up points. You can find all of the information on the World Cup here.
In my opinion, the new point system seems to be a good solution to help unify the off-road community. While it makes this a little harder for an individual pro to claim individual country titles that include pro title prize bonus money, if you’re committed to the World Cup you have the ability to make more of it than in years past. The only thing that I'm not a super big fan of is that it allows for outsiders that aren't committed to the whole series to shake things up.
If you look at the standings you can see that some pros that have dabbled in the series and do well at one-off events kill the available points for some of the pro’s that are fully committed. For example, Lesley Paterson and Timothy O'Donnell are here and they are currently NR which means they have zero points. Will they do well enough to steal some points away from the top current athletes in attendance, Suzie Snyder and Ruben Ruzafa, who are in the overall points mix? Probably not T.O., but you can't count out Lesley. And you can't blame them for racing – in fact, we welcome it. But my point is that it might be something to consider in next year's point system. Or maybe it’s just fun to be able to poke the bear a little with this sort of deal.
As you can see HERE Things are starting to get pretty tight in the top podium spots. And the weather looks wet for tomorrow, which should make it very interesting.
Some of the top athletes in the search for global points include: 1st number is current world ranking 2nd number is bib assignment for tomorrows race.
Men
- Ruben Ruzafa, ESP
- Sébastien Carabin, BEL
- Kieran McPherson, NZL
- Sullivan Middaugh, USA
- Sebastien Neef, GER
- Sam Osborne, NZL
Women
- Suzie Snyder, USA
- Samantha Kingsford, NZL
- Carolyne Guay, CAN
- Maria Doring, GER
- Lorena Erl, GER
We caught up with some of the Xterra athletes and staff on the podcast this week. We talk about their history in Xterra and what they think about some of this year’s changes.
We’ll have a post race story on our own race experience and thoughts. We have six people racing – 4 of us doing the long course, and 2 on the sprint. My personal goals are to not crash on the bike and not walk parts of the run course and maybe, just maybe, beat some time from 2 years ago.