📹If you only knew Gus Marfell as one half of @triathlontrouble, the social media account he runs with Team NZL pal Henry McMecking, you’d think he’s living the dream. This Saturday at European Cup Wels, the reality is a bit more complicated.
For the uninitiated, the nutshell version of Triathlon Trouble is two lads charting their rise through elite triathlon. It comes with a purposely tongue-in-cheek “Worlds best triathletes” bio line, 5014 followers and a YouTube expansion under the tagline “Babe wake up, Triathlon Trouble just posted.”
It’s everything this generation does well: light-hearted, self-aware, a scroll stopper for those smitten with swim, bike and run. Marfell and McMecking filming each other and Antipodean mates training and mucking about between sessions, riding roughly the same race calendar as mates rather than rivals.
What the feed doesn’t show is the challenging 18 months that has led Marfell to the latest scene, Banyoles, Tri NZ’s European training base in northern Spain. The why behind the Blenheim 22-year-old racing for his season at Conti Cup level in Wels this weekend while McMecking is in Hungary eyeing World Cup Tiszaújváros after his WTCS Quiberon false start last weekend courtesy of a throat infection.
The breakthrough. Then the break
Rewind to February 2025, and Marfell was fresh off a broken elbow and his now annual pre-season Arrowtown training camp with McMecking, Brea Roderick (and this year) Eva Goodisson when a late call-up dropped into his lap: World Cup Napier.
“I’d never raced a World Cup before and I was like, wow, yeah, I’d love to. I thought, even if it doesn’t exactly go my way, it’s experience,” Marfell said of what turned out to be an eye-catching 13th place finish on debut at the second tier of global short course triathlon.
“Obviously as we know, it went really well, and it started the year off amazingly. Like, way better than I could have ever expected. It was definitely like the first time I’d ever put down a performance that I truly believed that I was capable of, like I had truly trained for.”
Sadly, that feeling didn’t last. He was sick going into the Oceania Standard Champs in Devonport (16th), then crashed out of the Oceania Sprint Championships in Mooloolaba, a dreaded DNF. Two average results after a breakthrough tends to sharpen hunger rather than kill it, and Marfell built straight back toward the Oceania SuperSprint Championships on the Gold Coast, until a niggle in his lower back stopped him cold.
“I could run for like 400 metres and then the pain is unbearable,” he says. Physio Brad Beer flagged the likely diagnosis on the spot; the MRI at home confirmed a high-grade sacral stress fracture. Season over. Europe flights — his first trip there — cancelled.
“It was just something I had to do to save the rest of my career and not ruin myself when I’m this young.”
The part that stung longest wasn’t the rehab.
“It was so hard to watch everyone do the races I wanted to do, that I had my name down for, that I thought I could have done well at,” he says.
He’d all but made Team NZL for the U23 World Championships last October but never made it to Wollongong.
Rebuilding, slowly and on purpose
What followed was a deliberately unglamorous year. Marfell and his support team, led by coach Tess Mattern, identified fuelling as a likely contributor of the stress fracture alongside the crash itself. He spent months eating his way back to health before he ran a step — 66kg up to close to 80kg, shed again as the training load returned.
He’d quit his job at the start of 2025 to be a full-time athlete through the whole process, and has only this year picked up part-time work as a marketing assistant at McKendry Ford, mostly for the structure and a bit of income.
The comeback he’d scripted in his head — 11 months is a long time to dream — didn’t survive contact with reality. He came back at Napier’s Oceania Sprint Championships in early March expecting something close to the fairytale that had been his World Cup debut at Ahuriri Beach 12 months earlier.
“It was the very opposite,” Marfell said of his run to 19th. “Probably one of the worst races I’ve completed.”
The Oceania Championships [standard distance] in Devonport was a step up but still not the result – 23rd overall and 13th U23- or athlete he knows he is. Then Oceania Cup Gold Coast gave him the real signal — 14th, and by his own measure “probably the biggest improvement I’ve seen since my injury,” on the back of a solid swim, a chase-pack ride and a run that felt like his own again.
Almost on cue, he got sick before finishing 60th at the continental Supersprint champs at Runaway Bay days later so could write that one off without much fuss.
Doubt, in a place built for confidence
If there’s a version of this story that the Instagram feed actually gets right, it’s Banyoles itself. The lake on the doorstep, the safe cycling roads with ample elevation, the picture postcard running trails and a gaggle of fun training partners including, of course, McMecking.
But Marfell is honest about how hard the first fortnight there was, after an underwhelming Asia Cup Osaka Castle race on the way up to Europe.
“I probably had one of the worst swims of my life,” Marfell said of his 20th placing. “I just had nothing all day.”
What followed Japan was a further reality check during the first days in Banyoles.
“I was struggling to find a reason to believe that I am as good as everybody else,” Marfell said at a point when his own form had given him the least to hold onto.
What’s actually riding on this weekend
Currently ranked 319th in the world and 39th in Oceania, Marfell needs a Continental Cup finish within 3% of the winner to put his name in lights for September’s U23 Worlds in Pontevedra. The same mark will likely unlock a start at World Cup Tauranga on November 22, the start of three huge years in the Bay of Plenty.
He sat at 3.01% at Oceania Cup Gold Coast. Agonisingly short. Wels this weekend and Africa Premier Cup Larache in Morocco on July 5 are what’s left of this window.
“I’m trying not to put the stress on my shoulders of having to get that,” he says, “because I want to go into the races just feeling like myself.” Whatever Wels and Larache deliver, Marfell’s read on the season so far is plain enough. Not the comeback he’d dreamed up over 11 months on the sideline, but a hungrier one. The Instagram caption might joke “Worlds Best Triathletes”. The truth, for now, is a young athlete still working his way back to becoming the best version of himself first.
“I know I’ll get there,” he says. “It just takes time.”
