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Horsforth triathlete targets Euros win
There are surely few hotter talents in British sport right now than Horsforth's own Alistair Brownlee.
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The 21-year-old has gone from a promising youngster to one of the leading triathletes in the world in the space of a couple of months thanks to back-to-back World Championship Series wins in Madrid and Washington.
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Heading into Madrid as a relative outsider, Brownlee relegated world champion Javier Gomez into third as he ran away from the field in the final leg to win by nearly a minute.
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Brownlee was a marked man in Washington but he again proved strongest in the final stages to pip Gomez once more.
The Spaniard may well have been surprised at the spectacular emergence of the Leeds athlete - and he was not the only one.
"I can't believe it really," Brownlee told Press Association Sport.
"The first one, to win it the way I did was a massive surprise and then Washington I thought if I could race like I did the last time I'd be in with a chance of winning."
And heading the world's best triathletes felt pretty good, too.
"At the time you're not really thinking about it so much, you're just
racing but afterwards you think 'oh, that was good'," he added.
The speed of Brownlee's rise may have been a shock but that he made it to the top should not have been given his consistently excellent record coming through the ranks.
He took up the sport at the age of 10 having started off as a runner and a swimmer and enjoyed a breakthrough season in 2006 when he became junior world and European champion.
He retained his European title the following year and then moved up to become under-23 world champion last year.
Madrid was a key venue for Brownlee in 2008 as well, as third place in the World Cup secured his qualification for the Beijing Olympics.
The then 20-year-old upstaged his more experienced team-mates in the Chinese capital by leading from the front and was a contender for a medal before fading in the final stages to finish 12th.
"Getting there first was the major thing," continued Brownlee. "I knew for the first time ever I was racing with the top guys in the world for most of the race, it was quite a big breakthrough and gave me quite a lot of confidence.
"It was fantastic. I couldn't have asked for a lot more really, just if I could have carried on going for a bit longer it would have been nice but the heat and everything got to me in the end."
Brownlee has the ITU Triathlon World Championships Series in Hyde Park to look forward to next month but his immediate focus is on the European Championships in Holten, Holland this weekend, and he is setting his sights high after such a brilliant start to the season.
He said: "I'd at least like to get on the podium, and try and win. It's a championship, which makes it a slightly different race, but I'll give it my best shot."
Britain has a good record at world and European championships but that success has not been translated into Olympic medals as yet.
With London 2012 on the horizon, Brownlee is hoping that will soon change.
"The Olympics is one day and triathlon is very unpredictable, a lot can happen," he said.
"A lot of things need to go right on that one day to win the race so there might have been bad luck. All you have to be is slightly off your best on that one day and that's it, your chance has gone.
"There'll be a massive chance for us in London and hopefully someone will be lucky enough to get it right on the day."
There certainly seems a good chance that the athlete getting it right on the day could be Brownlee - or indeed his 19-year-old brother Jonathan, with whom he trains in Leeds - but the 21-year-old has other fish to fry first.
"It is a big incentive but it's still three years away and that's quite a long time really," he added.
"It's definitely there for everyone but most of us have other short-term goals before we get there, and maybe our minds are on that a bit more to begin with.
"But it is there in the back of my mind."
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Tuesday 22 May 2012
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