Lucy Charles-Barclay Out of IRONMAN 70.3 Worlds

Reigning IRONMAN 70.3 world champion Lucy Charles-Barclay has decided not to race at this year’s event in Nice. The two-time 70.3 world champ and 2023 Kona winner has decided to “put Kona first … as she commits fully to the final stage of her IRONMAN World Championship preparation.”

Here’s what the British star had to say earlier today:

“I’m healthy, and training is going really well. If anything, that’s what has made this decision so hard.

“I’ve gone back and forth on it more times than I can count, but I kept coming back to one question: what gives me the best chance of arriving on the Big Island at my absolute best?

“Anyone who knows me knows I’m a racer. Once the gun goes, there’s no 90 per cent setting. Nice could never be a training day or something I simply slot into the build. It’s a World Championship, I’m the defending champion, and I’d go there to give it everything I have.

“That would mean tapering, travelling, racing flat out and then recovering, all of which would mean missing key workouts with only a few weeks to get back.

“I don’t want to reach a hard moment in Kona and wonder whether I left part of my best performance in Nice. Once I looked at it like that, the risk versus reward became clear.

“Choosing not to defend a world title carries real weight, but Kona is the race I’ve built my whole season around. Sometimes being all in means having the patience not to race.

“I want to arrive on the Big Island knowing I did everything I could to be ready.”

There are just 28 days between the race in Nice and Kona, which lends credence to Charles-Barclay’s concern about turning things around after tapering and racing hard on the challenging Nice course.

Charles-Barclay’s year began with some challenges – she underwent surgery to remove her plantaris tendon in January.

“I remember barely running in January. I was in so much pain from the swelling of the plantaris rubbing on my Achilles tendon, and I texted my sports doctor back in the UK and he was like, ‘We can literally operate in two days,'” Charles-Barclay said in an interview in May, just before she won IRONMAN Lanzarote and validated her Kona slot. “I remember sitting on the green at Club La Santa debating whether I should do this. The decision was made when I thought: if I’m getting to my Kona camp here in August and it’s still annoying me, I’ll just be so annoyed that I didn’t nip it in the bud and get the surgery. So I decided to go ahead, and honestly, it was the best thing I could have done. Being back here running now and kind of pinching myself doing a 30 km long run with no pain — I couldn’t even run 10 km in January without stopping and walking, with other things in my body hurting because I was running awkwardly. It feels like it was a miracle surgery. I guess I don’t want to say that too soon — I haven’t finished the IRONMAN yet — but if I can finish the race here healthy, validate for Kona, then it feels like I’ve put to bed the surgery, I’m over it. And we can move on to hopefully a solid championship season.”

Charles-Barclay followed the race in Lanzarote up with a solid runner-up finish to Alanis Siffert at Challenge Roth, and has now set her sights on another big day in Kona and a chance for redemption after a tough day last year. Charles-Barclay and American Taylor Knibb were in the lead in Kona last October, but Charles-Barclay would be forced to pull out of the race with just under 10 miles of running remaining, while Knibb would collapse dramatically just over a mile away from the finish line, leaving Norway’s Solveig Lovseth to take a close win ahead of Kat Matthews and Laura Philipp.

Tags: