Welcome to the latest in a series of conversations with smart people who I think provide great perspective on issues in sports.
Over the past two decades, Paulo Leite has dedicated his career to the development of mass participation sports and international endurance events, particularly in triathlon. These experiences as an athlete and as an event organizer shaped the vision behind Triton World Series, a concept that was developed in 2017 and now has events around the world.
With eight events spanning three continents in the past few years, the next race will be Triton’s first in China, from October 31-November 1 in Jiangsu-Qidong. Paulo and I have seen each other at events and talked about sport, triathlon and life through the years, so it was a true pleasure to reconnect recently and discuss Triton in a bit more depth.
How Triton Stands Out
It’s a triathlon. But it’s not. It’s a multi-discipline event. It’s also a solo discipline event. Triton has something for everybody as an athlete.
“One of the things that Triton has, we have two race formats. We have the basic triathlon format that is swim, bike and run, continuously without stopping the clock. That’s the regular triathlon format, all on the same day. You do the swim, then you do the bike and then you do the run. And we have Triton 3. Triton 3 is more of a destination product, and basically, we separate the disciplines in three consecutive days. It allows for people to swim on a Friday afternoon. Why Friday afternoon? Well, they can fly in on Friday morning, we do the swim on Friday afternoon around sunset. Then we do the bike on Saturday, and we do the run on Sunday. We also allow for people that want to do just one day or two of the three days. You are able to join the full event, have the full experience, or say, ‘I would love to do, but I don’t really swim.’ Sure enough, what we hear from people that sign up for one or two days instead of the full experience is at the end of the event they will come up to us and say, ‘You know what?’ And I say, ‘Yes. Next year you want to do the full thing.’ So we try to create an entryway to triathlon, to the experience, to get some crossing over athletes from other sports, in particular swim, bike and run, to come and try and experiment with every detail that the brand has.
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