Forbes Triathlon committee members Nick Field and Nick Turner say online registrations have been double that of this time last year, in the lead up to this Sunday’s event.
Limited registrations may be taken on the day if capacity is not reached before then, but Field said it looks likely this year’s triathlon, the second to be held in Forbes, will be the biggest yet. The race will include swimming, cycling and running, but different distances have been included in this year’s event.
There will be Olympic, sprint and enticer distances, with Olympic being the professional standard distance, while sprint and enticer distances will be much shorter. The Olympic distances for swimming, cycling and running will be 1500 metres, two laps of 20km, and two laps of 5km respectively.
There will also be a division for children under 10 years of age with much shorter distances. Each event will start and finish at Lake Forbes on Bedgerabong Road. Turner said having three different race lengths for each discipline was good for enticing the whole community to get involved.
“Every event has different lengths, but we’re just trying to cater for everybody,” he said. “The Olympic distances seem to have attracted a crew from afar, and we’ve got some really good athletes from Bathurst,
Orange and Dubbo that have already registered online.” “The shorter ones are about trying to get a fit for the local people to get them involved, and hopefully the distances aren’t too strenuous for them.”
Turner said while the flat terrain in Forbes made it an attractive event for professional athletes to break personal best results, the event was more for locals to get a feel for how triathlons work. “What we want to do is provide an opportunity for people in the area to do a triathlon and see how it all evolves.
If it keeps growing like the way it is, maybe we can do something larger down the track and have a real marquee event,” he said. Turner expected there to be a great spectacle for spectators on Sunday as well, with athletes such as last year’s women’s winner Caroline Wolfson from Orange, Tyse Hurst from Dubbo and Nick North from Bathurst set to race.
“A lot of good athletes have elected to come here this weekend instead of Huskisson [large South Coast triathlon], so word has obviously got around that this was a well-run event last year,” he said. Spectating will be free of charge, and cyclists are being asked to be mindful there will still be other traffic on Bedgereabong Road.
