Will Canada’s Tamara Jewett surprise the field at Ironman Texas?

Ironman Texas is set to run on Saturday, and the pro fields are stacked with some of the best long-distance triathletes on the planet. The women’s race is headlined by three-time defending 70.3 world champ Taylor Knibb, 2024 Ironman Pro Series winner Kat Matthews, and 2022 Ironman world champion Chelsea Sodaro, but there’s another woman who could run away with the victory: Canada’s Tamara Jewett.

Jewett’s first Ironman

Jewett has been a rising star on the 70.3 circuit in the past few years, and she currently sits at 14th in the PTO world rankings. She has solid swim and bike performances (she ranks in the top 50 among PTO athletes for both of these disciplines), but it is the final leg of triathlon where Jewett really shines, and she has climbed all the way to first place in the run rankings.

Jewett routinely posts the fastest run split among the pro women in 70.3 and T100 races, helping her fly by much of her competition in the closing kilometres of each event. Earlier this month, she finished a stellar fourth at 70.3 Oceanside after dropping a 1:17:00 half-marathon (the next fastest split was a full 90 second slower than Jewett’s run).

Ironman Texas will be the first full-distance race of Jewett’s career, and it is sure to be a tough challenge, but if she can make it to the marathon within striking distance of the other top women, no lead will be safe.

It’s all in the run

The run is of course always important in a triathlon, but as the races get longer, the more that final leg impacts the results. In professional short-course racing, an athlete can have the fastest 10K split of the day, but if he or she gets off the bike a minute or two behind the leaders, they have no real shot of running onto the podium. In 70.3 racing, things are a little different. With a 21-kilometre run ahead of athletes after T2, there’s much more room to blow a lead or close a gap on the run course.

Finally, in Ironman racing, athletes have 42 kilometres to unravel and lose everything or claw their way onto the podium. Sodaro, one of Jewett’s competitors on Saturday, did just that in Kona in 2022. She was more than three minutes back of the lead after the bike, but a 2:51 marathon split lifted her past the rest of the field. She ended up winning the Ironman world title by a whopping eight minutes.

It will by no means be easy for Jewett on Saturday. She will not only have fierce competition, but she will have to go to a place she has never gone before on the race course. If she is moving well after exiting T2, though, the rest of the field should be worried, because when Jewett is in the zone, she is quite the unstoppable force.