Taylor Knibb and Sam Long are looking STRONG early in the triathlon season
Taylor Knibb is back to her old tricks.
A week after winning the T100 Triathlon season opener in Australia, Knibb won Ironman 70.3 Oceanside this past Saturday, breaking her own bike and race records. It was a dominant early season performance in what’s thus far shaping up to be another special season for the three-time Ironman 70.3 World Champion.
Taylor Knibb smashed the Oceanside bike record, previously held by ... Taylor Knibb.
Knibb raced off the front from the start of the bike onward (not quite a wire-to-wire victory, as she pointed out). Just 12 miles into the 56-mile ride, she had a minute-and-a-half over her closest competitor, and she stretched that advantage to four-and-a-half minutes going into the second transition. Her bike time of 2:15:27 smashed her previous record at Oceanside of 2:18 flat.
“I told my coach [Dan Lorang] I really wanted to set a really good 60-minute and 90-minute bike power because I feel like this is a great course you can do it on,” Knibb told Tri247.
Taylor Knibb is now 2-for-2 when it comes to winning races in 2026. That deserves a BIG high five.
Knibb’s race was nearly flawless. For the final leg, she wanted to run a 3:40 per-kilometer pace, and for most of her half marathon she was able to do that. But in the final four miles she struggled to hit the mark, though she never felt any danger from her competition. In the end, Knibb still smashed her previous course record with a time of 4:01:39, and now she has plenty of motivation to keep improving on the run.
“My wheels went off … with like 2k to go I was like, ‘oh,’ and there’s a headwind and we were going uphill,” Knibb said. “Sometimes you just have to go out and try. If you blow, you blow.”
Sam Long is in STRONG form in 2026, turning in career-best swims and smashing course records on his Speed Concept.
In the men’s race, Sam Long turned in an impressive fourth in a stacked field, also setting a course record on the bike.
Long had two minutes to make up to the leaders after a strong swim (“the best” of his career, he wrote on Instagram) in what is normally his weakest discipline. He tore through the field on the bike, ultimately catching the race leader by the 48-mile mark. He pulled into the second transition in first place with a bike time of 2:02:04, nearly three minutes faster than the previous record held by Lionel Sanders.
No one will fight harder, that's a Sam Long guarantee.
Long went out aggressively on the run in search of the win, but couldn’t hold off the fast-charging Kristian Blummenfelt in the final two miles. Still, Long can leave the race proud that his swim and bike are as good as ever, and that he fought as hard as he physically could.
“No fear in going after the win; always have the courage to chase your dreams even if you have no right,” he wrote after the race. “I am proud of my effort. In Nice I was [25 minutes] off the best in the world and here [I was two minutes.]”
