Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
On the afternoon of Sunday 6 September, in a harbour basin in the middle of St Helier, thirty-eight people will swim, cycle and run the same course three times over without a single pause. They race twice: one race for the women, one for the men, and each is over in under an hour. Nineteen men and nineteen women, the best short-course triathletes in the world, will race for $800,000 divided equally between them: the largest single-day prize fund in the sport this year.
The place is Jersey, an island of 120 square kilometres in the English Channel, closer to the coast of Normandy than to England. If you can get there, go. If you cannot, find the time and give it to the broadcast, because this is a rare thing in endurance sport.
The Supertri format sends athletes through three consecutive rounds of swim, bike and run with no recovery between them: 300 metres in the water, four kilometres on the bike and 1.6 kilometres on foot, repeated three times.
Drafting is allowed on the bike leg, which means riders may ride directly behind one another. The rider in front cuts through the air, and everyone behind covers the same ground at the same speed for noticeably less effort. Riding away alone is therefore close to impossible: a solo escape burns energy that the chasing group is saving, and the group brings it back. Everyone stays together, and the bike leg is decided by position rather than raw strength. You do not need a coach’s eye to see a person make a decision; you watch them make it, and you watch what it costs them.
For a century, endurance was a human drama that television could not quite hold.
When I spoke to Michael D’hulst in June, I asked him how Supertri came about and what part the Jersey final plays in it.
“I’m originally from Belgium,” he said. “In 1996 there was a Belgian who won the world championship in Hawaii, and I was motivated and said, oh, I want to try this.” The Belgian was Luc Van Lierde, who that October became the first European to win at Kona, in a course record of 8:04:08, in the first Ironman-distance race of his life. D’hulst was watching, and thirty years later he runs Supertri, the company that carries that dream forward.
“It’s the moment of wow, this looks exciting, I want to do this,” he said. “And that is what it delivers.”
He is clear about where the final sits in that machinery. “This is the pinnacle moment,” he said of 6 September. “If you talk about the marketing side, it’s the top of the funnel. It’s the best of the best racing for big prize money, so it gets a lot of attention, and it gives the aspiration for other people.” And then, without being asked: “On the 6th of September we will have all the Olympic champions, the world champions coming together and racing, and it will be this inspirational moment.”
The most interesting thing he said reached well beyond sport.
“You’re giving people an experience, you’re giving them a sense of belonging, you’re giving them the confidence, the sense of achievement,” he said. “People want that, people need that. And if it’s rooted in a physical, social environment, it’s very, very valuable.”
What Supertri actually is
Triathlon is not a new sport and it is not an exotic one. It is made of three things that almost every child on earth already does. Children swim. Children ride bicycles. Children run, constantly, for no stated reason. Nobody needs the constituent parts explained. What the Supertri format adds is a start line, a finish line and several thousand other people doing the same thing at the same time.
D’hulst believes the real obstacle is not fitness but resolve.
“The fitter you are, the faster you will go,” he said. “But the mind game never changes.” And more directly: “Everybody can do it, in my opinion. With a little bit of training, everybody can do it. You just have to believe.” Get past the fear of open water, do a little riding and a little running, and then “once you commit, then you just have to believe in yourself.”
He thinks this is why the sport has such a grip on people who run companies. “Triathlon is almost a metaphor for life,” he said. “Sometimes it goes good, then it doesn’t go good. Then you struggle. You have to come back.” He mentioned Leonid Boguslavsky, who founded the series with him and with the four-time world champion Chris McCormack, as someone the sport suited exactly because of how he thinks as an entrepreneur: “It’s very much focused on, okay, I do the plan, I will continue.”
About children I would put it this way. A child who trains for something, finishes it, and is met at the line by people who know their name learns several things at once: that difficulty is survivable, that a goal set in March can be reached in September, and that they belong to a group which notices whether they turn up. Those lessons carry over. Such children grow into adults who make decisions more cleanly, who can hold a plan across months, and who assume by default that they are not doing life alone. The medal and the win are not the main thing here; the community around them matters far more.
How the series came to Jersey
Jersey is a British Crown Dependency and not part of the United Kingdom: 120 square kilometres, about 103,000 people, its own laws, its own taxes and its own parliament, twenty-two kilometres from the coast of Normandy and a hundred miles south of Great Britain. The working language is English; Jèrriais, the island’s Norman dialect, survives in place names and occasionally in speech. It is a short flight from most British airports and a ferry from Poole, Portsmouth or Saint-Malo, which is how most of the field and most of the spectators will arrive.
D’hulst calls the island the spiritual home of the series, and there is a specific history behind the phrase.
Super League Triathlon was founded in 2017 by D’hulst, McCormack and Boguslavsky. The first event was staged that March on Hamilton Island, off the coast of Queensland, and it featured a men’s professional race only. Jersey hosted the second, in September 2017, and that was the first to include a women’s race. Katie Zaferes won it, ahead of Summer Cook and Nicola Spirig.
The island has since staged the race in 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2025. September will be the sixth.
The stakes and the field on Jersey
The prize fund is $800,000 for a single day of short-course racing: $400,000 for the men and $400,000 for the women, with $100,000 to each winner and payments running down to tenth place, which earns $14,000.
Jersey is also the one weekend of the year on which the professionals of the series race on their own. Adam Leitch, Supertri’s communications director, calls it “our only ‘standalone’ elite event of the year.” At Blenheim, Olympic champions and complete beginners used the same course; in Chicago, nine thousand amateurs entered. Jersey is the concentrate: thirty-eight athletes, nineteen of each, and in Leitch’s words “the very best of the best, including both Olympic gold medallists from Paris, racing our original Supertri format, and with $800,000 on the line for a single day event.”
In the men’s race, the rivalry that currently defines Supertri reignites. Alex Yee, the Paris 2024 Olympic champion, meets Hayden Wilde of New Zealand, whom he beat by six seconds after overturning fourteen in the closing kilometre of those Games, and again by a single second at the Grand Final in NEOM that November. Wilde returns from a bike crash in 2025 and an illness that wrecked his comeback this season; on Jersey the two will face each other for the first time in a year. They are joined by the reigning Supertri champion Csongor Lehmann of Hungary, the current world champion Matt Hauser of Australia, the Olympic mixed-relay champion Tim Hellwig of Germany, and the three-time Olympic medallist Jonny Brownlee, who arrives on the island having completed ten sprint-distance triathlons across a single weekend at Blenheim Palace.
The women’s race is no gentler. Jeanne Lehair of Luxembourg, reigning Supertri champion and last year’s Jersey winner, defends her title against the Olympic champion Cassandre Beaugrand of France, the series’ most decorated woman Georgia Taylor-Brown, and Jolien Vermeylen of Belgium, who won the Blenheim qualifier.
The three qualifying events of the rebuilt 2026 season, in Austin, Blenheim Palace and Toronto, each sent their top three of either sex to this start line. The athletes race as individuals this year rather than for franchise teams, a significant change for a series that made its name on squads.
The morning before
When I asked Leitch whether beginners would start alongside the professionals on the island, he answered directly: not at this event. What Michael describes as the intention of the whole series, an ecosystem in which “the world’s best professional athletes inspire the competitor in everyone,” works differently on Jersey: amateurs do not race with the professionals, but the same day gives them races and programmes of their own.
The organisers fill the morning. Before the professionals take the course, the island runs its own event. The RBC Race for the Kids Jersey returns in partnership with Supertri, with routes of 2.5, 5 and 10 kilometres that can be walked, run or wheeled; the previous edition raised £56,000 for the Jersey Child Care Trust, which supports children, families and early-years specialists across the island. All of it sits inside a broader island weekend of endurance sport that also includes Swim Run Jersey and the Jersey Spartan Athletics Club half marathon.
“We do a lot of community activation across the event,” Leitch told me.
Around the children’s race sits a schools programme that I think is the cleverest thing the series does. Every Jersey school that signs up receives Supertri Active School status; the school with the highest participation becomes the island’s Supertri Champion School and receives what children actually want, which is access to the elite athletes and a look behind the scenes at the final. Through the summer, pupils and teachers receive activity materials and video messages from the professionals who will race in September.
Then there are the corporate teams, which are more interesting than they sound. D’hulst was funny and interesting about the alternative. Client entertainment usually means Formula One or football, “and they drink, and they watch something. Everybody does that, it’s okay.” He is invited to football every year: “I don’t even remember who invited.” Whereas “a very different experience is, okay, you do a triathlon together.” Teams from UBS, from the Royal Bank of Canada and from a large insurer have raced in that format, coached by Olympians. Whatever else it is, it will not be forgotten.
This is a commercial series with a bank as a title partner, and the schools programme recruits as much as it gives. I would not devote a section to it if I had not watched the mechanism work at Blenheim. The children at the barriers there were not learning that sport is beautiful. They were learning that adults find things hard and keep going anyway, which outlasts any medal. A child who has covered their own 2.5 kilometres in the morning watches the afternoon professional race differently: as the same thing, only in their own future.
The company defines its own responsibilities in the same way. “At Supertri, we believe sustainability is about creating a positive long-term impact on the communities we visit,” D’hulst told me while I was reporting on London Climate Action Week. “Beyond reducing the environmental footprint of our events, we see participation in sport as a powerful driver of healthier lifestyles and stronger communities… We believe healthier, more connected communities are also more resilient communities.”
I asked D’hulst, as a filmmaker, what he thought triathlon was missing. He answered with a story.
“The best things that were done, and I go back to the late nineties, early two-thousands, NBC always had a documentary about Ironman Hawaii,” he said. “The documentary was always twofold. It followed the professional race, but it also followed some inspirational stories of normal people.” The pattern, he said, was somebody who had come through something terrible and then finished a triathlon. “It was not about speed. It was not about how fast he was.”
Then he gave one of his own. Two years ago in Chicago a boy of seventeen or eighteen signed up for his first triathlon. Shortly afterwards he was diagnosed with blood cancer. He went through the whole of the treatment, and a year later, on the recovery side of it, he said he wanted to come back and race after all. They coached him. He finished.
“I came back out, and I became stronger,” D’hulst said, giving the boy’s own account of it. “And I finished this goal that I was set, but that was interrupted.”
“That is the most powerful thing in triathlon,” he said. “Finding stories of people who do something incredible, who have overcome adversity and started doing triathlon, and it changed their life.”
Every sport becomes part of the general culture when it produces a single image that everyone remembers. Endurance had no such image for a long time: the race lasts for hours, and the decisive moment is almost invisible from the outside.
The founding exception occurred in February 1982 at the Ironman World Championship in Hawaii. Julie Moss was leading the women’s race when, in the last few hundred metres, her body stopped accepting instructions. She fell, stood, fell again and crawled across the line in second place, and an ABC crew filmed all of it. That footage did more for triathlon than any victory, because for the first time the sport had produced a picture instead of a result. The explosive growth of triathlon is conventionally dated from that broadcast.
Cinema found the sound before it found the plot: *Chariots of Fire* arrived in 1981, and Vangelis’s Oscar-winning score performed a strange trick, making slow motion read as effort rather than beauty. Literature went inward, and Haruki Murakami’s *What I Talk About When I Talk About Running* remains the modern text, arguing that endurance is about discovering who you are when nothing is happening. That is exactly what resists dramatisation: nothing is happening and everything is happening, and a camera cannot tell the two apart. A reader can.
Supertri, deliberately or otherwise, has given this material a shape that fits on a screen. Whether a great film or novel comes out of it is not for the organisers to decide, but the sport is now built so that one could.
Supertri currently works with sixteen global broadcasters. For most of the twentieth century a sport entered the culture by being bought. A network paid for the rights, and the payment was both the income and the proof of significance; the Julie Moss footage reached the world because ABC had already decided the race was worth a crew.
What has replaced it is owning the channel, which is at once easier and harder: easier because nobody has to be persuaded to sign a cheque, harder because the audience has to be built rather than inherited. A format designed to be watched is only half of the answer. The other half is having somewhere to put it. For Supertri, that is its own digital channels, where every race will be shown live.
How to watch on 6 September
Watching in person is free; the organisers have confirmed that spectators pay nothing. Sixteen global broadcasters carry the series, and the races also go out on Supertri’s own digital channels; where to find the coverage in a given country is worth checking there closer to the day. The detailed course layout along the waterfront has not yet been published.
If you go, come for the whole day. At Blenheim the professional race was only one part of a wide and busy programme. Jersey is arranged the other way round: this is a day built for the broadcast, and it is worth standing at the barriers to see how thirty-eight people behave when a season is settled inside two races of under an hour each. Come in the morning as well, and watch the children run first.
On the afternoon of 6 September, on the island of Jersey, the best athletes in the world will cover the course three times at full speed. I’ll be there on the island – do join me to see who wins Supertri Jersey 2026.
Images: courtesy of Supertri, via Wikimedia Commons and author’s own photographs.
Creativity's UK
