Three Roads to the Start Line: Paula Findlay, Georgia Taylor-Brown and Kate Waugh on Racing T100 Vancouver

One is here as the lone Canadian professional in the field, hoping she’s bounced back enough from her first IRONMAN win to be competitive. Another of the reigning T100 world champion, clawing back from an injury that that turned an eight-week setback into a five month ordeal. The third is the UK’s most decorated female Olympian, having earned medals of all three colours in her two appearances (silver in the individual and gold in the mixed relay from Tokyo, bronze in the mixed relay from Paris), who is juggling her LA 28 goals with the allure of the T100 world title. We caught up with all three as they prepare for tomorrow’s T100 Vancouver:

Paula Findlay: From Lake Placid to Kona, and Back to Where It Started

For most of her long and varied athletic career, Paula Findlay managed to stay clear of doing an IRONMAN.

“I don’t think I ever said never, but it was a long time coming,” she laughed. For many years there were lots of reasons not to do a full-distance race – she was thriving at 70.3 and T100 races. This year she finally made the jump, and the payoff has been bigger than she expected: a win at IRONMAN Lake Placid and a qualifying slot for the IRONMAN World Championship in Kona.

“Even during, it was enjoyable in a different way, because it’s just one notch less intense than a lot of these races, like the T100 and the 70.3,” she said. “So just being able to go at a controlled effort — and of course it’s long and you get fatigued in other ways — but I did like that intensity zone quite a lot. It felt very sustainable, and if anything, I was trying to hold myself back a lot of the time. In the last hour I was like, “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” but up until that point it was very manageable, and yeah, I did actually enjoy it.”

Kona wasn’t the original goal – “I was more excited about just doing an IRONMAN and doing well at it, plus it’s (Lake Placid) a course that suited me really well, so I prepared specifically for that course. But as Kona has become more real, and I’ve qualified and I’m wrapping my head around it, I am actually super excited for it. I think it’s the biggest scene, and I’ve just realized over the last few weeks how much people care about it — it’s all everyone is talking about. I’ve missed out on it for the last 20 years of my career, so it’s cool to actually be going and competing, and prepping for it.”

“From a sponsorship perspective, sponsors really care about it a lot,” she continued. “I always knew that, but until you’re really prepping for it, it’s hard to get a sense of just how much more important it is than some of the other races I’ve done. And that comes with a bit more pressure too. But since it’s my first time and I don’t really have any expectations, that takes the pressure off a little bit. But yeah, it’s cool — all the eyes are on it. I think it and the Olympics are the two biggest things. The Olympics are just so different, and it was in such a different time in my life, so this feels like a big thing that I can prep for in my current life.”

All of which makes Vancouver an interesting stop on her calendar – a step back to speedy T100 racing after the longest race of her career.

“When I go to these T100s or 70.3s, I kind of know exactly what to expect of myself in some ways, and what to expect of other people — you’ve watched them race a million times,” she said. “I was so on the fence about coming, even up until yesterday … Right now I have a really good mojo and positive vibe about triathlon in general, and that hasn’t been the case for me for years. But I didn’t want to come here and get really beat by all these fast girls and sort of hate it again. So that’s my only worry — that mentally this could really mess with my head a bit if I don’t have a good race on paper. But I’m trying to be realistic: my prep has not been the same as every other year. And there’s a lot of prize money here, it’s in Canada, and the T100 has been super supportive of me through my career the last couple of years, so I think it’s important to show that support back and have a Canadian on the start line. If I’m not here, there are no Canadians on the start line, which is crazy. So it’s more for the greater good of having pro sport in Canada, supporting the T100 being in Canada, which is really cool and really important. And for me, I think it’s a good opportunity to have a hard race … I don’t know if I’m totally recovered from Placid — I feel okay, but it’s hard to know until you’re really redlining effort. So I’m going to give it my best effort and try not to get too emotionally attached to the result.”

“I did podium at a T100 last year,” she concluded. “I’m trying to remind myself that I am good at this too — I’m not just an IRONMAN person now because I did one.” Her bar for success this weekend is simple: “As long as I come out healthy and make money and be in front of a home crowd, then it’s a success.”

Georgia Taylor-Brown: Splitting Her Season Between Two Worlds

After spending 2025 chasing variety – she raced everything from gravel to 70.3 to T100 to Supertri … basically whatever sounded fun – Georgia Taylor-Brown is keeping things simpler this year.

“This year I actually have to do my job again, unfortunately,” she said, only half joking. “It’s not very sustainable to do what I did last year and race 22 times.”

The pull to T100 racing hasn’t disappeared, though. Taylor-Brown took her first T100 title in Pamplona earlier this year, and she recently called her coach with a case of start-list envy about 70.3 worlds in Nice. She was talked back to the original plan – earning valuable qualifying points for the LA Games in 2028 and going after the T100 world title.

“I still want results, I want to be back at the top and properly training, but I also still want to have fun with it,” she said of her short-course “job.” That doesn’t mean she’s not still having fun and enjoying the longer-distance racing, too.

“I’m actually training for it, so it was a nice surprise to take the win (in Pamplona), but I’ve also been doing the training, so I did back myself,” she said.

She is finding a new-found respect for non-drafting racing, though, something she previously considered to be boring compared to the tactical intensity of draft-legal racing. “I always thought it’s not really racing — you’re just out there, and it’s not aggressive racing,” she said. “But now I’m actually enjoying it more because it’s more of an honest, individual race — that is what you can do on that day, rather than just sitting on someone’s wheel.”

A new shift in coaches and venue has sparked some new enthusiasm – she’s now working with Glenn Poleunis and his PTC squad in Girona, Spain.

“It’s very different, and it’s something that I didn’t think I needed at this point in my career — I’m at the back end, I’ve got a final few years in me,” she said. “So it’s something I didn’t think I needed because it was obviously working what I was doing, but now I’ve jumped into it, it’s a nice little refresh for the end of my career” — one she’s committed to running through LA 2028. “That’s the plan,” she confirmed, before adding with a laugh that afterward she’d like to “go off and, I don’t know, have a family and do some other things.”

Having competed at both Tokyo and Paris, Taylor-Brown is all-too-aware of just how competitive it will be to try and make the British team for LA, so she knows just how much she’ll have to work at the WTCS racing scene next year. “We have six in the top 30, which is ridiculous, and we only get three spots,” she said. “You need to fight for it — if you want to be competitive in LA, you need to be competitive with everyone in your country.”

In terms of tomorrow’s race, Taylor-Brown is looking forward to a competitive race.

“It’s a really tough field,” she said, running through the competition — Kate Waugh, Lucy Byram, Alanis Siffert and Findlay among them. “I’m hoping it’s going to be much tighter at the front, and we’re going to have a group to run with, and it’s going to whittle down, and hopefully I can be the last one standing.”

Kate Waugh: A Hard-Won Return to the Start Line

If Findlay’s story is about a leap to a new distance, and Taylor-Brown’s is about a tough balancing act, Kate Waugh’s is about learning patience the hard way. The reigning T100 world champion tore her soles in February, an injury that she was told would sideline her for a couple of months.

“It’s not been an easy journey to get here,” she said. “It’s just something that I originally was kind of told by the physios if I managed it correctly it would be an eight-week issue, and it’s turned into kind of a five-month issue probably through no fault of my own other than… I just didn’t manage it properly. I didn’t listen to the physios properly. I was so determined to be back racing earlier than what they originally said.”

The urgency came from a couple of fronts – pressure to perform on the T100 circuit again (she admits that was self-imposed – her sponsors told her to take her time), and concern over Olympic qualification. “I just tried to rush things,” she said. “And it was the kind of injury that I couldn’t rush.”

“It’s been really challenging from that perspective — really tough mentally and emotionally,” she continued. “There was a phase in my rehab where I felt like I was making no progress, and it was super frustrating. I would go weeks of endless hours in the gym with physios, rehab every day, and I just didn’t feel like I was going anywhere.”

It’s all been a helpful learning curve – she now realizes that the T100 title came, in part, because of a change of pace from Olympic-cycle pressure and enjoying the longer-distance racing. This year she let the expectations creep back in.

“I think I changed my approach at the start of this year, where I suddenly was putting a lot more pressure on myself,” she said. “I was like, okay, I’m the reigning world champ, I’ve got to come back, I’ve got to do better than what I did last year… but I know now, from what I’ve learned in the last 18 months, that I just need to enjoy what I do, take off training days, do my rehab properly, and the results will show for themselves.”

Tomorrow’s race will be a reset rather than a statement.

“I hope this is almost like the start of my season, in a way — just a late start this time,” she said. “It’s a super strong field, and the racing’s getting more and more aggressive. I wouldn’t have come here if I didn’t think I was in a position to be competitive, but I certainly hope I still have more to give later in the year as well — this is just a starting point.”

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