Saturday, 12 September 2009
Britain's Alistair Brownlee sprinted the final 500 metres of the run leg to win the Dextro Energy Triathlon ITU World Championship Series Grand Final on Australia’s Gold Coast to be crowned world champion.
The 21-year-old who has just completed his degree at the University of Leeds, won five of the seven World Championship series events this year, coming into the final with a 351-point lead over Javier Gomez of Spain.
The Gold Coast final was worth 1,200 points, and Alistair needed only a top-five finish to clinch the Championship. The former junior and under-23 world champion finished in a time of 1 hour 44min, 51sec.
Alistair is part of the triathlon club based at Leeds Metropolitan University Carnegie High Performance centre, and is coached by Carnegie Director of Sport Malcolm Brown, and in swimming and cycling by high performance centre coach Jack Maitland.
He has two brothers, Edward and Jonathan. His younger brother Jonathan Brownlee is also a triathlete who has won European Junior Championships and finished 2nd at the 2009 World Junior Championships.
Alistair represented Great Britain at the 2008 Summer Olympics in the triathlon event, finishing in 12th place and first British competitor. During the 2008 season, his best world cup finish was 3rd place in Madrid and he also won the under-23 world championship.
Alasdair has become the first ever person to win the ITU world Triathlon titles for Junior Men (2006), Under 23 Men (2008) and Senior Men (2009).
During the final he had positioned himself well coming out of the swim and ensured himself a strong position in the main pack of the bike ride before he and main rivals Gomez and Jan Frodeno, the Olympic champion, broke away on the run having made up a 90-second deficit on the early leaders. The Briton and Gomez dropped Frodeno with little over 500m to go. As a result defending world champion Gomez had to settle for second place and came in six seconds behind Brownlee while Frodeno of Germany finished third.
Brownlee clinched the overall title with a perfect 4,400 points - 800 from each of his previous series wins in Madrid, Washington DC, Kitzbuhel and London and the 1,200 for this victory.
Gomez was second overall with 3,959, followed by today's fourth-place finisher, Maik Petzold of Germany, with 3,442 and Frodeno in fourth overall with 3,162.
Brownlee said: “I knew that if Javier [Gomez] didn’t win overall, I could afford to come tenth and still win the Championship.
“It was his prerogative to chase me down and so I just let them go and see what he wanted to do.”
Brownlee said Gomez produced some testing surges over the final two kilometers.
He said: “I just had to do everything I could to hold on.
“I just told myself to get to the top of the hill and I just got to the top of the hill and hung on and on the last lap I just gave it everything I had – and it was downhill."