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REPORT

The world marked a new era in triathlon history with the debut of Super League Triathlon on Hamilton Island, Australia last weekend. Super
League Hamilton Island broke new ground by pitting 24 of the world’s best athletes against each other across super-sprint distances of

300-meter swims, 6-kilometer cycle legs, and 2-kilometer runs in action-packed and television-friendly formats.

the overall win.

Day 1 of racing featured the Triple Mix
format in which competitors faced each
other across three stages of swimming,
cycling, and running in different orders,
with a bonus of five seconds off their total
times for the stage winners as well as for
the first finishers of the swim in Stage 1,
the run in Stage 2, and the cycle in Stage
3. Australian Jake Birtwhistle (#44), the
2015 Under-23 triathlon world champion,
claimed Stage 1’s swim-bike-run, with
Will McCloy interviews co-founders Leonid Richard Varga (#12) of Slovakia claiming
Boguslavsky, Michael D’Hulst, and Chris McCormack
the swim prime. Varga then swam his way
Simultaneous live broadcasts, as well as live to victory in the final leg of Stage 2’s run-
streaming, brought unprecedented exposure. bike-swim, although it was Birtwhistle who claimed
Super League Triathlon’s official live broadcast the run prime. Stage 3 saw Andrea Salvisberg
partners included Eurosport (UK and Europe), (#69) of Switzerland claim the bike prime. Murray
Siminn (Iceland), Fox Sports in Asia and Australia, (#07) stayed in contention coming onto the run
SuperSport (South Africa), beIN Sports (USA and in eighth place, then unleashed his foot speed to
Canada), the Bike Channel (Italy), Tencent (China) overtake eventual second placed Varga and third
and Sky Sports (New Zealand), which resulted in placed Ryan Bailie (#39) of Australia.

110 airings of live programs and replays across the Despite Varga’s total bonus of ten seconds,
event weekend reaching millions across the globe. Murray’s total time of 1:05:31 was still 12 seconds
A 49-minute event highlights program is being faster than Varga’s adjusted time of 1:05:43. Bailie
distributed to 43 networks, reaching 388 million logged a total time of 1:05:44. Murray gained the
households, for airing from March 25,
2017.

Super League Triathlon also innovated
with interactive live coverage between
races with Facebook Live, Instagram
stories, live race streaming on Facebook
and the Super League Triathlon
website, and uploaded highlights and
full race coverage to YouTube to reach
close to one million combined views
and still counting. New viewers and
hardcore fanatics found themselves
glued to their screens over the three
days of racing that resulted in South Ben Shaw pedals hard with Andrea Salvisberg and Richard
Africa’s Richard Murray (#07) taking Varga behind him

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