In a summer full of great moments for the sport of triathlon, this one may not have been the most heralded, but it was undoubtedly one of most important – Kristian Blummenfelt is not leaving.
There wasn’t quite the Leonardo Di Caprio Wolf Of Wall Street speech to accompany the announcement, but it almost merited that. Losing arguably the sport’s biggest star would have been a bitter blow for swim/bike/run.
Just before the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Blummenfelt’s brilliant coach Olav Aleksander Bu announced that the 30-year-old from Bergen was ’90 percent likely’ to go pro cycling from 2025, with contending for Tour de France wins the ambitious goal.
A few short weeks later though the news emerged that instead Kristian would instead stay in triathlon, with the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics now a potential long-term goal.
Why did Blummenfelt stay in triathlon?
So why did Blummenfelt, who is now preparing for the IRONMAN World Championship in Kona on October 26, back out on cycling to stick with a sport where he has already won every major prize. The answer is quite simple – money.
Blummenfelt’s rise to greatness in 2021 coincided with the advent of the Professional Triathletes Organisation, and the continued rise of supertri. Right now, there is arguably more money in elite triathlon than ever before. He aced it just at the right time.
Bu, speaking to TRI247, admitted that Blummenfelt’s brilliant success in recent years became a ‘disadvantage’ when it came to pondering the potential move to cycling.
“There was a too large gap in payment.” he told us.
“The disadvantage of being the world’s best triathlete.”
‘Big Blu’ and L.A. 2028 – the plan
Now of course much focus will be on how Kristian plans the next four-year cycle into that L.A. showpiece in 2028. This after his return to short-course racing in 2024 resulted in only a 12th-place finish in Paris.
Bu told us: “10 months of dedicated prep for Paris is what we already dubbed ‘mission impossible’ before he went back. It was supposed to be two full years, but ended up being one season with almost no racing, compared to those on the Paris podium who had focused on Paris since Tokyo.”
So if Paris was ‘mission impossible’, what will Blummenfelt’s schedule look like to make Los Angeles ‘mission possible’?
Bu explained: “We’ll have to come back to this later, but if L.A. becomes realistic, it means transitioning earlier with more short-course racing. However, with the development we have seen around the tactics, involving dedicated domestiques, it has become a less interesting sport from an individual level, and more a ‘team sport’.”
