A significant part of the funding that Corus are providing to the BTF as its Premier Sponsor is being invested into three Elite races which will be televised on Channel 4. The series starts with a Sprint distance race at Strathclyde Park near Glasgow on May 27th which will, for the first time provide a National Sprint Distance Elite Championship. The Scottish venue is also part of the master plan in Glasgow's bid for the 2014 Commonwealth Games and we understand that a number of alterations to the venue to make it suitable for the cycle phase have been made, including the replacement of all the "sleeping policemen" traffic calming measures with ones that can be removed.

The second event in the series is a Standard distance race at Bryn Bach Park near Tredegar in Wales on June 9th and this will also be used as the National Elite Championship. The swim will take place in the 36 acre lake and the rest of the competition will be entirely within the 340 acres of grounds. Bryn Bach Park has also had a significant amount of work done in recent times including a major new golf course, rebuilding of much of the internal road system and a brand new Visitor Centre which will form the race headquarters.

Closing out the series will be a Super Sprint race in London's Hyde Park on July 22nd with this event seen as being a potential proving race for a future World Cup and the 2012 Olympics. The logistics of putting on an event within Hyde Park have long been a stumbling block, it was something of a surprise earlier this year to find that the Students Partnership Worldwide had succeeded in getting permission to run a similar distance event there on April 29th - see this story. The race will be run as an eliminator with two heats over a 300m swim, two-lap 7k bike and two-lap 2 k run and the top 20 from each then go into a final round. This is vert similar to the Australian Formula 1 series from a few years back, and will potentially make for great TV and spectator involvement.

The logistics of each race will be handled by a local organising committee which will include event management, local authorities and the various stakeholders while the BTF have also been recruiting an overall series co-ordinator. One of the issues that the series faces is that the announcement has come relatively late in terms of athletes planning their overseas races for the year. The Welsh race is on the same weekend as the Vancouver BG World Cup, possibly not a major issue as we expect that a National Championship will get a three line whip in terms of attendance, but the Hyde Park race falls between the Lifetime Fitness race in the States and the Salford BG World Cup and clashes directly with the the Kitzbuhel BG World Cup. On the flip side, that does potentially mean that there will be some major overseas elite athletes that could be enticed over pre-Salford to use it as a warm-up.

Each race is only expected to have a field of 50 men and 50 women, with 10 of those places reserved for non-GB athletes, and when we asked the BTF's Chief Executive, Norman Brook, about the issue of GB athletes needing to race abroad to gain ITU points rather than in the domestic series he did acknowledge that, for some athletes, points were likely to be more important. However, providing elite-level drafting races based within the home countries that allow the "up and coming" athletes to compete against overseas professionals is definitely seen as providing for the future of the sport in a way that utilising normal domestic events cannot. It is clear that there are major differences between this series of races and the, ultimately flawed, events that were put on a few years ago by the BTA and Great Run at Stockton, Swansea and Liverpool. There the events moved after a year, despite all the hype about location X being the "new home for British triathlon", and in order for them to even begin to pay their way they also had to stage age group events alongside the elite. The Corus series starts from an entirely different perspective and has a much longer term goal -- plus this is only the first full year of the agreement and so we should see a repeat performance for 2008. Let's just hope it isn't in the form of Channel 4 repeats...