FEATURE-Olympics-Defending triathlon champion Flora Duffy in race against time

Olympic triathlon champion Flora Duffy returns after an 18-month injury layoff this weekend but faces a race against time to be ready to defend her crown in Paris. The 36-year-old became Bermuda’s first gold medallist in a comprehensive win at the Tokyo Games but a knee injury has kept her from competing since she won a second successive world title in late 2022.

Olympic triathlon champion Flora Duffy returns after an 18-month injury layoff this weekend but faces a race against time to be ready to defend her crown in Paris.

The 36-year-old became Bermuda's first gold medallist in a comprehensive win at the Tokyo Games but a knee injury has kept her from competing since she won a second successive world title in late 2022. She lines up on Saturday in Yokohama as the 2024 World Triathlon Championship Series makes a delayed start after the season's first event in Abu Dhabi was cancelled because of stormy weather.

"My knee is good now, but it only sort of turned the corner in December. So then it takes quite a while to build up to appropriate training," Duffy explained in an interview with Reuters at her home in South Africa's winelands prior to departing for Japan. "So it's definitely going to be a tight timeline to be in medal contention shape for the Paris Olympics. But if everything goes smoothly, I think I can get there in good shape. But yeah, it's not an ideal situation at all."

Duffy suffered a partial tear on her patellar tendon and her recovery has taken longer than expected. "It means a very different build up to what it was before Tokyo, where I was pretty confident and training had gone well," she said.

"You want to be as consistent as possible with your training and having a year essentially not training properly is not ideal. It's going to be interesting to see how it all comes back. "But I'm going there with intentions of performing my best to try and win a medal. But yeah, I've made it significantly harder for myself, right?"

Tokyo was a fourth Olympics for Duffy, who was among the favourites and ran on her own to gold after slowly stripping away the field. LEADING THE OLYMPICS

"I've led many big races before but there's nothing like leading the Olympics. Like kind of having a secure enough gap that you know, it's very likely you're going win," she said. "But you also don't really know what's going to happen in the back half of a 5k or a 10k run in a triathlon. So for me, it was so crucial to just kind of distract myself and break down this last 5ks of the run. And, yeah, as the kilometres ticked by, I was like, 'Oh, this is going to happen' and only with about one kilometre left did I allow myself to let it slowly creep into my mind. It's a weird sensation, you want it to be over.

"But at the same time, you're like, 'I might never get this moment again. So I need to soak it all up and enjoy it'." The Olympic medal might have been a dream from early on but Duffy admits the reaction to it – particularly on her island – was significantly more than she anticipated.

"My world felt like it changed in an instant. And it was incredible to see the response and see how meaningful and how impactful winning Bermuda's first ever gold medal was to everyone back home. It was incredibly special and it felt like it was more than just this sport." ACHIEVED GOAL

The medal, she added, also left her wondering 'what next?' "After winning in Tokyo, I was sort of hit with, 'well, why am I doing this now I've achieved my biggest goal?'.

"But then there's this other part of me that obviously loves the Olympics. In Tokyo, everything went perfectly from a race point of view. But I didn't have my friends, my family, my sponsors, that sort of Olympic experience, because of all the COVID protocols that were in place," Duffy said. "So that's really a big motivation, to go back to Paris and to have everyone there, almost regardless of the outcome, just to see it as sort of a celebration of my career, getting to race at the Olympics, as a defending champion in front of everybody." (Editing by Toby Davis)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)