By Maria Bregman – founder and Editor-in-Chief of Creativitys.UK; writer, filmmaker, and UK Global Talent.
Once a year, Toulouse lets people into the Garonne, and Supertri is the reason. A report from a triathlon in the historic heart of one of Europe’s youngest cities, open to everyone from first-timers to seasoned athletes.
A triathlon in the heart of the city
Toulouse was my third Supertri of the year, and the first time I saw the series as a truly urban event.
Supertri was founded in 2017, as Super League Triathlon, by Michael D’hulst, Leonid Boguslavsky and the four-time world champion Chris McCormack, with one idea: to rebuild triathlon around the person watching it. A classic Ironman lasts many hours and cannot really be watched. Supertri made races short and fast, put them in front of crowds and on television, and then began to build events that anyone can enter.
In June I was at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire: 6,000 participants over a weekend, the largest triathlon in the United Kingdom, as the series’ communications director, Adam Leitch, told me. Vintage carousels on the lawn, stands full of people, and Jonny Brownlee, with his three Olympic medals, completing ten sprint triathlons in two days on the same course as the beginners. In September I was on Jersey for the final of the professional series, which I had previewed in August: Olympic champions, $800,000 in prize money in a single day, races decided by seconds on the waterfront of a small island.
Both were magnificent. But Blenheim takes place in the grounds of a palace in the countryside, and Jersey on an island. Toulouse was different. The swimmers start from the Prairie des Filtres, the long meadow beneath the Pont-Neuf, and swim towards the Pont Saint-Pierre. The bike course runs on roads closed to cars. The run goes through streets people walk every day. From the bridges and the embankments the city looks down at the race, and the race looks back up at the city.
“Most of the time triathlons are just outside the city,” Supertri’s French press consultant, Fabrice Preau, told me, “for many reasons, because we need to have a spot where you can swim. Here we are lucky.”
On Saturday, standing on the bridge, I recorded a few words for my own camera: “Tomorrow it will be the start of swimming, and I really expect a lot of emotion.” I was not wrong. At Blenheim you go to the race. In Toulouse the race comes to you. You can walk out of a café and be at the finish line. You can watch your neighbour cycle past your front door. I have never felt anything quite like it at a sporting event: a whole city turned, for one morning, into a stadium.
One day in the river
Every Toulousain knows the Garonne. You see it from every bridge, students sit along its quays until late at night, and on a warm evening half the city seems to be looking at the water. What almost nobody here has done is swim in it. Bathing in the river has not been allowed for decades, and for most of the year the Garonne is something you admire from the bank.
There is one day a year when that changes. On race day Supertri has permission to take people into the river in the middle of the city, and anyone who enters can swim where their parents and grandparents never could.
“Just for your information, la Garonne is not open to swim,” Fabrice Preau told me on the eve of the race, as if sharing a local secret. “You can’t swim in la Garonne. But we have the authorisation.” For people, he said, it is “a unique opportunity”.
On Sunday 4 October, more than 1,500 people were expected to take it.
Toulouse is the fourth-largest city in France, with around half a million inhabitants, and one of its youngest. According to INSEE, the national statistics office, its urban area is home to more than 120,000 students, almost half of all the students in the Occitanie region. You feel it the moment you arrive: the squares are full, the cafés are full, and the city seems to run on the energy of people in their twenties.
It is also the capital of European aviation. Airbus has its headquarters in Blagnac, beside the city’s airport, together with the final assembly lines for its passenger jets, and the company says more than 28,000 of its employees work in the region. Engineers come here from all over the world. A good part of the aircraft you have flown in began its life a few kilometres from the Prairie des Filtres.
And it is beautiful. Toulouse is called la Ville Rose, the pink city, because its historic centre is built of local brick made from Garonne clay, which glows pink and orange in the sun. At its heart is the Capitole, the vast square and the town hall with its theatre, and from there the old streets run down to the river, the quays and the bridges.
Geography makes it a natural place for an international race. Paris is about an hour away by plane. Spain, as Fabrice Preau reminded me, is two to two and a half hours by road, close enough for Spanish clubs to come for the weekend. The Pyrenees are on the horizon.
It was exactly here, in the historic centre of the pink city, that Supertri held its Toulouse race this year, the race that closed its 2026 season.
A race for everyone
In 2026 Supertri decided to focus its Toulouse weekend entirely on mass participation. There were three distances, each of which could be done alone or as a relay:
- XS: 400 metres of swimming, 10 kilometres on the bike, 2.5 on foot.
- S: 750 metres, 20 kilometres, 5 kilometres.
- M, the Olympic distance: 1.5 kilometres, 40 kilometres, 10 kilometres.
“One single event, only for general public,” Fabrice Preau said, “which is an evolution of Supertri all around the world.”
The idea is simple: anyone can take part. On the same course that day were people racing their first triathlon, people who had done a few, and experienced athletes who came to enjoy a race close to home.
Toulouse already knows what elite triathlon looks like. Supertri arrived here in 2022 with its professional series, and the city remembers the 2025 final very well. Jeanne Lehair, born in France and racing for Luxembourg, won the race by three seconds and took the season title, and at the medal ceremony her partner walked onto the stage, went down on one knee and proposed. She said yes. That same year a mass-participation race ran alongside the professionals for the first time, and, by the organisers’ count, 1,300 people entered.
This year the whole stage belonged to them.
A land of rugby that learned to swim
Why Toulouse? Fabrice Preau does not answer with figures.
“The elite athletes have always told us that Toulouse was the only place where the public was so generous, enthusiastic, ecstatic. We are in the south of France, and people from the south are so generous, emotional. It’s really another atmosphere than Paris.”
Then he said something that does not usually reach a press release. Toulouse, he said, “at the origin is a land of rugby. It’s not the land of triathlon. Honestly, we have established triathlon in Toulouse with the club.”
This is the city of Stade Toulousain. Triathlon was planted here by two parties together: the series and the local club, Triathlon Toulouse Métropole, TTM. The club has been a partner from the beginning and supplies most of the volunteers, the people who stand on the corners, point the way and answer questions.
Five years on, people travel to it. I told Fabrice Preau that at Blenheim people had come from all over England, not only from Oxford. Was it the same here? He looked at his phone; the organisers had exchanged registration data the day before.
“Forty-four [per cent]. Forty-four, so approximately half are coming from outside Toulouse.”
From the region. From Paris. A few from Britain. From Spain. Almost half the field had travelled to swim in a river that the rest of the year belongs only to the view.
I did not cover Toulouse alone. Victoria, who reports for Creativity’s UK from the city, is in the second year of a master’s in Global Management at Toulouse School of Management and is part of the student community that gives Toulouse its pulse. She knows the city the way students know a city: on foot.
Toulouse, she told me, is built like Cambridge or Oxford, only larger: a city in which student life is not an annexe to something else but the main background. She has three places she shows visitors. The first is the Capitole.
“I feel like all the roads will bring you to the Capitole. Every time you walk around Toulouse, you will definitely visit Capitole.”
The second is the Garonne. “It’s a very pretty river,” she said. “Sometimes it changes its colour.” The third is Place Saint-Pierre by the bridge, the liveliest spot in town, where students gather to enjoy, as she put it, their youth and their student life.
She also told me something a visitor would not notice unaided. In the Toulouse metro the stations are announced twice: in French, then in Occitan, the old language of this region. The voice in the metro is a daily reminder that this city is older than the country it finds itself in.
On race day I asked her, on camera, what Supertri gives the city.
“I think Supertri is a very amazing opportunity, and it’s really special that Toulouse were able to host this event. It’s very special. I’ve never seen the city being so involved. Everybody is cheering up, people are trying their best on the race, and it’s just amazing energy, and you can see how everybody is supporting each other.”
Several of her own friends were on the course that day.
“My friends are not professionals, but I think they are very involved and passionate about this sport. They are maybe not on the level of the Olympic Games, but I think they are pretty good, and I support them today.”
Most of them, she noted, were young men, and she hopes that next year more women will join them “if the advertisement will go further”. In a city with more than 120,000 students, that is not a small hope. Word travels fast on a campus, and students listen to Victoria with interest.
The race starts from a place with a name that is hard to walk past: the Prairie des Filtres, the meadow of filters.
The name is not a metaphor. In the nineteenth century the city took its drinking water from here. The meadow’s sandy soil worked as a natural filter: the water of the Garonne seeped through it and was pumped by the water tower at the end of the bridge to the city’s fountains. The tower is still standing.
So the meadow from which the swimmers went into the water was, for half a century, the place where Toulouse drank its river. According to the local press, the water has improved a great deal in recent years and the city is discussing places for bathing in town. Until then, a Supertri race number is the way in.
On Saturday a briefing was running over the loudspeakers on the meadow: where to stand, how to rack a bike, what the basic rules are. “This is one of the first participant briefings for the race,” Fabrice Preau explained. Everything a newcomer needs to know is explained the day before, so that on race day you only have to think about the race.
I told him what I say at every Supertri and believe a little more each time: that doing a triathlon is my dream. One day. Perhaps in two or three years.
And you, I asked?
“Yes, I’m doing triathlon. Short distance.”
He has trained since childhood and has raced long. “The most I’ve done is half Ironman. Which was enough, to be honest.” In Toulouse he does not race. He works. “You can’t do both, unfortunately.”
Is it difficult? He gave an answer more exact than any motivational speech.
“If you are well prepared, it’s never difficult. Or you can consider that it’s always difficult because, yes, it’s a huge physical effort. But if you are prepared, there is no problem.”
His advice to a beginner is to start with the XS. It is enough to feel the main thing, the transitions, which he called smart and fun: the moment when you run out of the water and have seconds in which to become a cyclist. “XS is already a good way to feel triathlon spirit.” If you like it, there is the S. The only real peculiarity of preparation, he said, is that there are three disciplines and not one: “You have to find time to swim, find time to cycle, and another time to run.”
And the swim is an experience of its own.
“Swimming in la Garonne is very different to swimming in a swimming pool. It has nothing to be compared. It’s another water. It’s another feeling. You will see tomorrow when the start is given. It’s crazy, there are so many people swimming everywhere. You may have heard about this expression we have in triathlon: for the swimming we talk about the washing machine. And if not, you will understand tomorrow, just looking at the start, why we call that the washing machine.”
He was right. When the start is given, the river that the city looks at all year is suddenly full of arms and spray, and then the crowd stretches into a line and the Garonne is a river again, only with people in it.
The whole city watching
A commentator was working above the course. It was rush hour out there, he said, as the first swimmers came round, and a few seconds later the first athlete had already completed a lap. Later, at the finish, his voice rose again: the second woman in one race had won her place by a single second, sprinting on the finish line.
Along the barriers stood people who had simply come out to see. Olga, from Supertri’s London office, told me that very early that morning there were already families along the course holding signs, some of them in costume.
“I love the families,” she said. “I love when people come with kids and with dogs and with parents. It ends up being like a community thing, so you do it with your friends and you invite people to come over and see you, and then that’s just that very happy moment.”
Olga told me about one of the winners: “He brought his daughter and she was supporting him. The little kids, like, ‘go papa, let’s go papa’.”
Near the finish a young man went past me with a group in tow. “I’ve found some mates,” he called out in French, “I’m taking them to the finish with me, we’re going to make some noise, you’ll see.” A moment later: “Look! Bravo! Félicitations!”
A man at the barrier was watching the cyclists the way people look into a shop window. I asked him what he made of it all.
“It’s good to do this for the city. It gives a good image. And then it’s something I want to do myself. It inspires me, and it inspires other people too.”
Until next year, then?
“Every year.”
His name is Pierre, and he lives in Toulouse. At Blenheim, D’hulst had described to me the moment the whole series is built for: “It’s the moment of wow, this looks exciting, I want to do this.” Pierre said almost exactly that, looking not at Olympic champions but at his neighbours.
Voices from the finish line
Edwin lives in Toulouse and had left home at 8.15 that morning. “The event is really cool,” he told me after the finish. “I enjoyed it.”
Manu Renard is from Toulouse too, and he began with what mattered most to him: “We really are in the centre of Toulouse.” Then: “It’s a great organisation. It’s really nice to run here. I work nearby, I live nearby.” For him this was a race for pleasure. His main event of the season, over a long distance, had been three weeks earlier. That is the beauty of a course like this: experienced athletes come to enjoy themselves, and their presence makes the start line feel normal for everyone else.
Ginny was born in Toulouse and lives twenty minutes away.
“The race felt very safe,” she said. “The Garonne… I’m from Toulouse, so I know it.”
The bike course, she said, was closed to traffic and felt very secure; even on the descent there were volunteers ready to help. And she loved the run because it did not go in a straight line but took her through Toulouse itself, with the crowd cheering all the way.
What Ginny said next I will keep for the end. It was the best thing I heard in two days.
Body or mind
There is a question I ask at every Supertri: what gives way first, the body or the mind?
At Blenheim I put it to Ray. She is nearly seventy, and it was her fourteenth triathlon. Triathlon, she told me, “stretches you in every sense. It stretches your body and especially your mind. Because I’ve trained, I know I can do it. But my mind tells me, ‘You are nearly 70, you cannot do it.'”
At the same lake I put it to Jonny Brownlee.
“I’d say the mind. If you set your mind to do something, I’m sure you can force your body to do it.”
In Toulouse I asked Victoria.
“I would say mind, because body can be trained and can be pushed. But if your mind is not in the right place, then I don’t think you can do it.”
A woman close to seventy, an Olympic medallist and a student who has never raced gave the same answer.
Victoria said something else that has stayed with me.
“It’s Toulouse, everybody’s running here. If you can run, you can also cycle and you can swim. Then triathlon is for you.”
What I will remember most about Toulouse is that the city did not simply host the race. It took part in it.
Julie Servat is a deputy mayor of Toulouse, responsible for professional sport and for the city’s sports policy. I spoke to her beside the course.
“The city supports, first of all, the Toulouse triathlon clubs, which are taking a large part in the competition today. And then the city makes the site available, here, the Prairie des Filtres, along with the equipment and the barriers. That is how we help with the running of it.”
October in France is Octobre Rose, the national month of breast cancer awareness, when towns across the country hold pink runs and fundraising events. Toulouse made its triathlon part of it. The TTM volunteers wore pink. A special XS race was held on the closed course, and all of its proceeds went to the IUCT-Oncopole, the city’s cancer care and research centre. Supertri also sells a special-edition T-shirt in Toulouse, and the proceeds, “a hundred per cent”, as Fabrice Preau put it, go to the Oncopole.
The Oncopole is a cancer campus in the south of Toulouse, on the bank of the same Garonne, where the university, the clinic, the hospital and the research centre work side by side. It stands on the site of the AZF chemical plant, which exploded on 21 September 2001 in one of the worst industrial disasters in modern French history.
Supertri’s partnership with the Oncopole began in 2024, with a thought that struck me as very exact. France was holding the Olympic Games, and the patients at the centre could not go; they were in treatment. So, Fabrice Preau told me, the Olympics were taken to them.
“We brought to the Oncopole the French Olympic team.”
With them came the Paris Olympic triathlon champion, Cassandre Beaugrand, whom I later watched win the final on Jersey.
At about one o’clock the racing gave way, briefly, to the stage, and two researchers from the Oncopole came up to receive the cheque. One of them, a professor of immunology and a medical oncologist, explained what the money will do. His team works on triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive form of the disease that often affects young women.
“Some patients respond to the treatment, but others do not respond, unfortunately. They have resistance mechanisms. So we have to find resistance mechanisms, to increase the survival of patients.”
A year ago the race’s money went to a project that uses artificial intelligence to read breast tumour samples under the microscope. Every year it is a different project, he said, and every one has been completed. “We will come back,” he said, smiling, about next year.
The prize-giving was quick and cheerful. All the winners come onto the stage at once for one large photograph. Beside Supertri on the stage stood the president of the TTM club.
A few minutes before the ceremony I was watching a man sitting on a bench with two children. An ordinary father on the grass on a Sunday afternoon. Nobody gave him a second look. I said to Victoria that this was the best thing about races like these: how modest the people in them are.
Then the announcer read out a name, and he walked to the stage. He had won his category.
At a race like this, the winner cannot be told from a spectator until the moment he is called, and cannot be told from one again five minutes later, when he is back on the bench with his children. Anyone watching from the barrier can look at that stage and think: that could be me.
What comes next
Julie Servat was clear that the city wants Supertri to stay.
“We have been in partnership with Supertri for many years. This is not the first year they have come, so we are used to hosting them. To prepare what comes next, I have a meeting with them in the coming weeks, so I think things are well on course to continue, and for them to keep coming to Toulouse.”
From the series’ side, D’hulst told me in September that after Toulouse the team would plan the next season with more for triathlon clubs and teams, and the new Enduro format, which grew out of Jonny Brownlee’s ten triathlons in two days at Blenheim. In Britain, Brighton has joined Blenheim on the calendar. The series has set itself a public goal, which Leitch named at Blenheim: “We would like to try and achieve thirty thousand people racing across our events, and ten thousand of those being first-time athletes.”
Ten thousand first-timers. After Toulouse I understand where they will come from: from meadows like this one, from barriers like Pierre’s, from student flats like those of Victoria’s friends, from cities that open their rivers for a day.
The feeling of being Jeanne Lehair
Of this year’s three races, Toulouse was the warmest. Blenheim showed scale: six thousand people and a palace. Jersey showed speed. Toulouse showed what happens when a race belongs to a city.
And there was Ginny.
Until this year she had come to Supertri to watch. She stood at the barrier and watched the professionals. A year ago she saw Jeanne Lehair win here: three seconds, a title, a ring on the stage.
This year she went out on the course herself for the first time. She swam in the river she grew up beside. She rode through a city closed to cars, past volunteers in pink. She ran through her own streets.
I asked her what she felt.
“Supertri, I had never done it. I used to watch the professionals. But it was a great organisation, and the atmosphere at the finish was incredible.”
And then:
“I felt as if I were Jeanne Lehair last year.”
A year ago, on this spot, Lehair won a title. Ginny won the right to say that sentence, and I am not sure which of the two is rarer.
I ended my report from Jersey by saying that next season one wants to live this from the inside, on a start line of one’s own. Toulouse made that feel much closer. The shortest distance here is 400 metres of river, ten kilometres of closed road and two and a half kilometres through the pink city. My mind is not ready yet. But it is closer than it was in June.
Next October the Garonne opens again for one day. I would like to be in it.
Maria Bregman’s earlier reports on the series: Supertri at Blenheim Palace (June 2026), Inside the Supertri Pro Series Final on Jersey 2026 (August 2026) and What Supertri Showed on Jersey 2026 (September 2026).
By Maria Bregman, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Bregman. Maria Bregman bridges art, technology, and global business https://mariabregman.com.
