Belgium’s Jelle Geens, the brilliant winner of the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in each of the last two seasons, should have been racing T100 San Francisco this weekend.

But an injury setback means he’s currently unable to run and it’s placed his bid to race the IRONMAN World Championships in Kona for the first time in jeopardy.

Revealing the news in his latest YouTube video, which is embedded below, he said: “After a recent scan, I was diagnosed with a Grade 2 femoral shaft stress reaction, forcing a change of plans before my next race at T100 San Francisco. While it’s a setback, it could have been a lot worse, and the focus now is on making the right decisions for the long term.”

Timing now tight for Lake Placid

Geens is arguably the best men’s middle-distance athlete out there given the nature of his two 70.3 Worlds successes – in 2024 he saw off Hayden Wilde, who has been utterly dominant in the T100 since then. And last year he won an epic battle with Kristian Blummenfelt, with the Norwegian bossing the IRONMAN Pro Series this season.

But Geens had set his stall out this season to test himself at full-distance, explaining: “Winning the 70.3 World Champs for a third time in a row in Nice would be super cool, but I don’t think it adds that much value to my career. Obviously, I’d take it, but I really want to now just focus on winning Kona, and it might take me a while.”

The Belgian’s full-distance debut at IRONMAN Texas proved a chastening one as he went all in for the win only to hit the wall midway through the marathon and was eventually a DNF.

He then nominated IRONMAN Lake Placid on 19 July as his ‘Plan B’ in terms of qualifying for Hawaii – but that now looks a longshot with this latest news and the only other event before the window shuts is IRONMAN Kalmar in Sweden in mid-August.

Waiting game

The good news for Geens and his team is that they have caught this injury early, massively speeding up his chances of a quick recovery.

He said: “It could have been way worse if I’d kept running on it and luckily I can still swim and bike. Let’s hope it goes quite quick and was just a little bump in the road for this year.

“We’ll do another scan and hopefully if the bone is healing nicely I’ll be able to start running again.

“Until we get to that point I’m not going to fixate on my mind on which races I want to do – it’s 15 weeks to Nice [for the 70.3 Worlds] and if I ‘eff’ something up now then Nice will be in jeopardy.

“In the end Kona is a big goal for me this year but we’ll have to see what’s possible.”