USNA Triathlon Team Excels at National Championships

This past weekend, the USNA Triathlon team delivered its best performance since 2009 by winning the Men’s National Championship and ending the University of Colorado's five-year winning streak. The women’s team were a very strong fifth place which, added to the men’s championship, gave the team an overall 2nd place.

The scoring for the weekend was composed of two races: a sprint-distance draft legal race that allows for team tactics and scores the first individual of each team and a non-draft Olympic-distance race which is more a test of individual efforts. Four athletes can score, and an additional three are used to displace in the scoring.

In the men’s race, the three used for displacement beat every team’s scoring fourth except one. Navy actually fielded thirteen men, and as another example of this year’s depth, Navy’s 13th man would have scored fourth for seventeen of the 31 complete men’s teams.

There was an additional non-scoring draft legal mixed-team relay which brought together two men and two women from each school in a very fast and team-spirited race. Each team member completed a very short triathlon in order of woman, man, woman, man. Navy finished a very close second, only coming up short in the final run segment. This was a strong showing of Navy’s co-ed depth.