🏃 Watch out when Saxon Morgan finally nails a standard distance run he knows he’s capable of.
The 25-year-old Cantabrian came within a whisker of matching his World Triathlon Championship Series best in Alghero early Sunday NZ Time, his 26th just a place shy of his performance at WTCS Hamburg in 2021.
It was a decent start to his latest European campaign and the best of the Kiwi males in Italy with James Corbett 28th – a marked improvement in his 44th on WTCS debut in Cagliari in October 2022 – and Tayler Reid 32nd after a bike crash.
But Morgan, the freshly minted Oceania super sprint bronze medallist, still felt he left a lot on the table after suffering over the final stages of the 10km run to sign off with a split of 33:20 in the Sardinia heat.
“I mean I’ve had better, had worse,” Morgan told SBR-Tri.com of a performance he’d specifically earmarked with new coach Mark Elliott.
“This has been a race that Mark and I have been targeting kind of since the start of the year to really try and have a really good WTS result and prove myself over the standard distance. But yesterday wasn’t quite that.”
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Morgan got off to a decent start in the swim, coming out of the crystal clear Alghero waters 15 seconds down. But a series of crashes split up the bike leg; Kiwi team-mate Tayler Reid was one of those caught up as he articulated on social media.
“Death before DNF 💀,” Reid wrote. “Hit the deck hard on the first lap of the bike in Alghero WTCS. Bounced back up and got going again but the break went up the road without me.
“Battled through the pain on the run, it wasn’t fast but we got it done. Been a couple of weeks in the trenches hopefully some good luck, health and training coming up.”
Morgan was in reasonable shape till a crash at the far u-turn on lap one which saw chaos ensue with the bunch split.
“After that, the front group just kept extending their lead on us really significantly every lap with us losing, I’d say around 15 seconds a lap, which is a lot. The bike was relatively easy from that point when we knew we kept bleeding time to the front so, everyone sat up a little bit. In terms of the WTS standard of biking, it was probably one of the easiest WTS bikes I’d done.”
As such, Morgan hit the run feeling good but the conditions soon took their toll.
“The first 6k I was kind of on pace on where I was hoping to run on a pretty tough run course. And then yeah, that last 4K I really struggled in the heat. Obviously hadn’t done enough heat prep coming from New Zealand which is obviously starting to cool down and knew it was going to be hot here. But I think I kind of underestimated having to run 10k in the heat… I was in a little bit of survival mode.”
So while it was close but no cigar, Morgan is still upbeat as he eyes his next races in Austria and Morocco at European Cup Wels (June 14) and World Cup Saidia (June 29) respectively. “Still a relatively good result, a few [world ranking] points gained and a lot of valuable knowledge and stuff that I can take forward and a great experience racing at this level,” Morgan said.
“You’ve got to do these kind of races to know exactly where you are against the best in the world. And I’m happy-ish where I am at the moment.
“There’s still plenty of work to be done but the swim bike is pretty much there for me. It’s just that run still developing, maybe one and a half minutes off where I really wanted to finish yesterday.
“I was hoping to run around that 32 minute mark for the 10k but just really suffered in that last 4k and bled about a 1:20. But overall, happy, good start to the European campaign, yeah, a lot of positives to take away.”
