By Mark Etheridge
Two-time Olympian Richard Murray ended 2016 on a winning note with victory in the Caribbean and will be hoping to start this year in similar fashion at Saturday’s Discovery World Cup at the Waterfront.
Murray won the Island House event in November after three days of hard racing. Since then he’s had downtime in the Netherlands over the festive season before completing his first true training in neighbouring Namibia.
He missed last year’s Cape Town event (which was held over the longer Olympic distance) due to a broken collarbone in a bike crash in Australia.
‘I’ve had a reasonably long off-season,’ he told the SASCOC website this week. ‘I’ve probably only got the constructive side of training going from the end of December into January. I had an awesome time in Netherlands, but I’ve now got three to four weeks of good training under the belt.
‘So although it’s been a slightly slower start to the season than in previous years, the fitness levels are probably around the same.’
A men’s elite field, smaller than usual, will line up at Quay 6 for the 750-metre swim, 20km bike ride and 5km run.
Only 40 will start in the harbour basin waters, with temperatures of around 15 degrees Celsius expected.
Included in that line-up are eight South Africans, including Olympic bronze medallist Henri Schoeman.
Says Murray: ‘It’s a reasonably good line-up for this time of the year, not quite as stacked as some races which have 50 to 60, but there are some very good swimmers in the field who will push the pace hard in the first part of the swim to try and get away along with Henri. So the rest of us will have to be careful about that and limit the damage coming out of the swim.
‘Podium-wise I’d say Henri, myself, Vincent Luis of France perhaps, but there are a couple of other top French guys, like Raphael Montoya who has won U23 World Champs in Chicago, so you never really know come race day.’
After the heat of battle on Saturday Murray still has a busy year, but it’s not going to be be all about triathlons. ‘I’m definitely not going to race as many WTS races this year. This year is going to be more of a fun year for me. I’m going to do my first 70.3 event this year as well as the XTerra off-road event in Grabouw and then the Hamilton Island Series in Australia in March.’
While in Namibia it wasn’t all about training, but all’s well that ends well. ‘Our car’s door-locking system was jammed and all our swimming gear was stolen. But luckily the police stopped a suspicious car, we got all our gear back and the guys were locked away!’
Come Saturday and Murray will be looking to steal an early-season March on his competitors in the Mother City.