Beth Potter lines up at WTCS London this weekend with her bid for redemption very much on course as she looks to complete the championship win that eluded her so cruelly last season.
Having battled with a foot injury through the end of last year and into the winter months, she believes the worst is now behind her, and the focus is very much on winning another world title.
The 2023 champion was, of course, one of the favourites to take the top honour last season when back-to-back wins in Karlovy Vary and Weihai set her up perfectly for what everyone expected to be a Wollongong showdown with French ace Cassandre Beaugrand.
Tertsch takes title as favourites founder
In what should have been a ‘winner-takes-all’ tussle between the two, they arrived in Australia knowing that whoever finished ahead of the other would be crowned 2025 WTCS World Champion – provided they at least made it to the podium.
As it turned out, neither of them would finish anywhere close to the top three, with Beaugrand first to blow up on the run, closely followed by Potter, leaving the door open for German Lisa Tertsch to grab an unexpected title success.
Beaugrand recorded a DNF while Potter eventually came home in 16th, a finish that was only good enough for her to take overall third in the season’s standings as she was left to ponder what might have been.
The fact that she is now back on top of the rankings midway through the 2026 campaign as she heads to her ‘home’ race around the London Docklands this weekend is testament to her battling character and deep determination to bounce back from disappointment.
Samarkand win opens up new season
A win in the opening race of the season at Samarkand was duly followed up with two runner-up spots at Yokohama and Alghero before a slightly disappointing sixth in Hamburg last time out.
Still having to manage her foot injury, she remains cautiously optimistic as she looks forward to the thrill of racing once again in front of a partisan British crowd.
“My main focus is the WTCS this season, so I can try and get redemption for last year,” she told TRI247 in the build-up to this weekend’s race. “At the moment, because this injury is quite unpredictable, we just take it week-by-week and see how it responds.
“I’m really happy with where we are. I spent a long time injured this winter, so I wasn’t expecting to come out and win the first race of the season. I’ve been pretty close to the wins a few times, so it would be good to turn those two seconds into firsts, but I think I’ll get there by the end of the season.
Listening to her body more
“I’m not making excuses for myself, but people around me know how much running I have missed this winter. I think I’m just really proud of the fact that I was able to get on the podium and be competitive.”
Admitting that the injury, coupled with her tough experiences last season, has forced her to listen more to her body and not make the same mistakes which cost her last year.
Looking back on the disappointment of Wollongong, she said: “I think I’ve had so many disappointments across the many years I’ve been in sport, and I think that’s just part and parcel of competing.
“It is frustrating, and, you know, it was so close. Not a lot of people, other than the ones really close to me, knew what it took out of me in that month leading up to Wollongong. It was more the mental side of it than anything, lining up as the favourite with a pretty significant injury. It was hard. I almost pulled it off… but not quite.
‘You just don’t know what is going to happen’
“I think I was sad for a couple of weeks, but I got married in the off-season, and I had lots of other exciting things to look forward to. And it’s just part of the story, isn’t it? That’s what is so unpredictable about sport: you just don’t know what’s going to happen.
“Hopefully, it’ll be one to remember that the two favourites completely bombed out. I mean, something funny always happens at the final. I couldn’t believe it when Cass dropped, and for a split second I was thinking, ‘I’m going to win this’. And then literally three minutes later, the same happened to me.”
Come Saturday, however, she will have the backing of a home crowd very much expected to make the most of a first WTCS UK-based race since 2023 – and the first to be held in the English capital since Alistair Brownlee and Gwen Jorgensen took the wins in 2015.
And as someone who competed on the track at Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games in 2014, she knows only too well just how much of an impact such fervent support can have on performance.
‘You definitely get a boost from the crowd’
“It definitely does make a difference; I wasn’t doing triathlon when it was here in London before, and when it came to Leeds, I hadn’t really had that breakthrough yet, so I was kind of chasing a result that I probably wasn’t capable of,” she said. “But I think now there is a very realistic chance that I could be winning the race or on the podium for sure, and I think that’s really exciting to do that in front of your home crowd.
“I feel very lucky in my career that I’ve had a lot of championships or Commonwealth Games on the track that have been in this country. You definitely get an extra boost from the crowd, and I always thought that when I hit the front, the crowd would cheer, and it felt like you were being lifted up somehow. It’s exciting, and I’m just so glad it’s back in the UK.”
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