Eyes Ahead to LA 2028: How USA Triathlon Finds and Develops Future Olympians and Paralympians
by Kelly O'Mara
It’s an almost famous story now: USA Triathlon’s legendary College Recruitment Program (CRP), led by Olympian Barb Lindquist, went out and recruited a swimmer and runner from the University of Wisconsin who had never raced on a bike before.
That new triathlete went on to qualify for the London Olympics and, ultimately, to win gold in Rio. Yes, her name was Gwen Jorgensen.
But Jorgensen isn’t the only triathlon success story to come from the ranks of former college swimmers and runners. That’s how Olympic medalists Katie Zaferes and Morgan Pearson found the sport. And Taylor Spivey and Kirsten Kasper, who represented the U.S. at their first Olympic Games in Paris this summer. The list goes on.
The CRP is one of the most successful recruitment programs USA Triathlon has had and maybe the most well-known — but it’s not the only way USAT finds its Olympians, nor is it necessarily the best way for the future.
Taylor Knibb and Kevin McDowell, both Olympic medalists in the Mixed Relay in Tokyo, for example, instead came up through the junior and U23 development ranks before becoming members of the U.S. Elite Triathlon National Team. Same for Seth Rider, who made his Olympic debut in Paris and helped the U.S. win its second consecutive Olympic silver in the Mixed Relay.
So how does USA Triathlon recruit and develop the next national team members, world champions, and Olympians for LA2028 or Brisbane 2032? Where do we find those athletes? Is college recruitment of swimmers and runners still how elite triathletes are made, or will they come out of the junior elite triathlon ranks? Or from somewhere else entirely?
“For me, it’s both/and,” said Scott Schnitzspahn, USA Triathlon’s High Performance General Manager.
The talent identification & development programs
While the CRP is still one way USAT’s high performance staff looks for and recruits potential triathlon champions, there are several different programs USAT uses to recruit and develop athletes — to get both future Olympians and Paralympians into the sport and provide the athletes the support they need to grow and succeed.
“We’re trying to have as many different entry points as we can,” said Parker Spencer, USAT’s Project Podium head coach. “Think of it less as a straight line, and more as a funnel,” he said. “There’s not just one way to find the next Gwen or Katie or Morgan.”
That funnel includes:
Junior & U23 National Teams
For young triathletes who come into the sport as kids, there’s a traditional pathway: local junior teams run by different coaches and clubs around the country, four youth (ages 13-15) & junior (16-19) development races, and the USAT Youth & Junior National Championship. While any kid can race the non-drafting youth races at nationals, they have to qualify for the championship elite draft-legal races — held in West Des Moines, Iowa this July.
The best of these young athletes can then qualify for the Mallow Junior/U23 National Team, funded now by USA Triathlon Foundation donors Audra and Michael Mallow. This comes with three tiers of support (coaching stipends, travel to races, access to training groups) and is meant to serve as a bridge from being a junior elite to eventually being on the U.S. Elite Triathlon National Team.
Project Podium & NCAA
Some of those young triathletes will go on to pursue triathlon in college — instead of taking scholarships in swimming or running. Since 2014, there have been a growing number of schools offering varsity girls triathlon, as the sport makes a bid to become the next NCAA championship sport. But because the NCAA effort is for women’s draft-legal triathlon only, there was also a desire to create a college development program for young male athletes. Enter Project Podium.
Project Podium, headed up by Spencer, is an elite college-aged development training group based at Arizona State University in Tempe. The 10 young men get a scholarship to ASU, travel stipends, equipment and facilities, and a squad of other dedicated athletes also working to develop into world-class triathletes. Some of them were amazing junior triathletes who now have the option to continue to pursue triathlon in college.
And some of them excelled at one or two of the sports (with potential in the others) and were recruited to triathlon instead of pursuing NCAA Division I track and field, for example.
CRP and High School Recruitment Program
That’s where the recruitment programs come in. Not every future Olympian will come up through the junior triathlon pipelines. The CRP still works to find amazing college swimmers and runners, bring them to a training camp, introduce them to the sport, and then get them set up with a coach or group to develop as triathletes.
The goal is for athletes recruited into the CRP and on one of the tiers of funding to go from being introduced to triathlon to being on the national team in two years (on average) — with
different markers and milestones along the way that USA Triathlon’s Talent ID Coordinator Tommy Zaferes has developed after analyzing the data of what successful athletes need to do.
But, there’s an open question among world-class triathletes and the USAT high performance team about
whether you can wait until college or later to recruit new triathletes anymore; the development of the sport has changed globally. “Now, the best athletes in the world are in their early 20s,” said Spencer.
To that end, USAT’s Talent ID arm also launched the High School Recruitment Program in 2023 — which operates similarly to the CRP, but focuses more on introducing talented high school athletes to the sport. Zaferes and Spencer go out and find amazing high school runners or swimmers, bring them to a camp, maybe get them to Youth & Junior Nationals, and make sure they keep triathlon in mind as an option.
Paralympians
There are similar pathways for paratriathlon, with para-development races, para talent ID and funding tiers, and a resident Paratriathlon National Team in Colorado Springs once athletes are accepted into the program. There are also recruitment efforts, partnering with existing para organizations, and talent ID camps — though it’s slightly more complicated to identify future Paralympians because when and how athletes come to the para side of the sport can vary so widely.
“There are like 10 different ways you can be successful in this sport,” Zaferes said.
Who is USAT looking for
One of the things the high performance staff and talent ID staff at USA Triathlon spend a lot of time thinking about is if and how the sport is changing, and what that means about how you need to develop athletes to succeed not next year but in years from now.
For example, who Spencer has recruited to Project Podium has changed as the program has evolved. He used to look for athletes who met a certain model across all three sports — but now instead he often looks for high school athletes who are exceptional in one of the sports and have potential in the others.
And he looks for athletes who will help the overall group dynamic and push each other.
He recruited XTERRA athlete Sullivan Middaugh, who transitioned to road cycling and just won an Americas Cup this spring, and Texas state champion high school runner Reese Vannerson, who had offers to run at the NCAA
Division I level but opted to instead focus on triathlon (and has gotten faster at running in the meantime, too).
“The talent we now have coming through is unlike talent we’ve ever had at this age coming through USAT,” said Spencer.
The time standards for the college recruitment and high school recruitment programs are very hard now — think: college women who can run low-16 minutes for 5K and/or swim low-2 minutes for 200 yards.
Updating those standards was part of an effort Zaferes made to go through all the results for dozens of different world-leading athletes over the years (and athletes who didn’t make it to the top level) and create specific targets and benchmarks. An example: athletes recruited into the CRP should be able to hit their first Continental Cup podium within six months.
The idea is that the focus and resources in the high performance program are going to develop the best young athletes into world-class triathletes.
The bumps on the road to success
Of course, you don’t know which 16-year-old athlete or even 24-year-old is going to end up being the one to win a gold medal down the road. “Almost everybody doesn’t make the Olympics,” said Schnitzspahn — but even those athletes who don’t become National Team members could end up staying involved in other ways as coaches or race directors or behind-the-scenes.
At the same time that the sport is getting deeper and younger, there’s also research showing that the best athletes later in life often did a variety of sports as kids and didn’t specialize until they were in their teens — partially because that allows them to develop skillsets and athleticism, and partially because they don’t burn out then.
There’s an element of that in why Spencer has his athletes racing SuperTri to learn bike handling and race skills from the best in the world, and doing track meets in the spring. And there’s some of that in why Zaferes keeps tabs on 40 different juniors and college athletes, letting them experiment with triathlon.
But even once it’s time to get serious, there are still a few obstacles for future American stars.
The U.S. doesn’t have many World Triathlon Continental Cup races (and no World Cups), making it hard for athletes to gain experience without traveling. Nor are there many daily training environments based in the U.S. to learn the skills they need — i.e. training squads with high-level development-focused coaches that USAT can send athletes to once they leave Spencer’s program or if they come out of an NCAA squad.
And when you look at the top 200-ranked triathletes in the world, you don’t currently see a ton of U23 American women on that list. Is it just because the senior U.S. women are so good they’ve crowded them out, or are the NCAA triathlon programs currently incentivized to win NCAA national titles instead of developing Olympic athletes? Or is there something to the fact that traditional sports development is based off 20-year-old men, and women’s progression arcs typically differ?
All of these are questions the high-performance staff spend a lot of time thinking about. Because out of that whole big recruitment and talent identification funnel, only some of those athletes will excel — and some of them will eventually make the U.S. Elite Triathlon National Team, and some of those will make the Olympics.
And maybe, if the funnel is big enough and the support good enough, one or two of those athletes will win Olympic medals one day — and inspire the next batch of young triathletes.
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