New Zealand triathlete Hayden Wilde is the Ironman 70.3 world champion. The 29-year-old won the half-distance world championship in Nice, France, on Sunday, European time, holding off a late charge from Norway’s Kristian Blummenfelt to win by 18 seconds in three hours 50 minutes 51 seconds, RNZ reported.
Belgium’s Jelle Geens, who had won the title for the past two years, finished third, 1 minute 49 seconds behind. It was Geens who ran Wilde down late in the same race in Taupō in December 2024, leaving the New Zealander with second place on home soil.
A half Ironman is a 1.9km swim, a 90km ride and a 21.1km run. In Nice the swim was in the Mediterranean, the bike course climbed into the hills behind the city up the Col de Vence, and the run went back and forth along the Promenade des Anglais on the waterfront.
Wilde came out of the water in a big lead group and was 27 seconds off the front heading into the first transition, according to Slowtwitch’s race report. The American website said he was reportedly the only professional man who chose not to wear a swim-skin in the non-wetsuit swim.
He lost ground on the early climbs and sat 40 seconds down at one point, but more than halved that deficit by the top of the climb and moved into the lead on the long descent back towards the coast. Italy’s Michele Bortolamedi was first off his bike, with Wilde 11 seconds behind.
Wilde caught Bortolamedi within a kilometre of the run. Germany’s Lasse Nygaard Priester then ran up to his shoulder and the pair swapped the lead through the first 10km before Wilde pulled clear. Triathlete magazine noted he did it all after dropping his watch as he set out on the run.
The real danger came from further back. Blummenfelt had struggled on the bike and started the half-marathon 2 minutes 29 seconds down. He then ran it in 1 hour 5 minutes 12 seconds, passing Priester and Geens, and with less than 2km to go Wilde’s lead was down to about 30 seconds. Wilde’s own half-marathon of 1 hour 7 minutes 21 seconds was enough, and Blummenfelt ran out of road.
Norway’s Gustav Iden was fourth and Priester fifth.
“It’s awesome to execute a race,” Wilde said afterwards.
He told RNZ that at about the 15km mark “the legs felt really good”, but by 19km he had to dig deep. With the gap still at 32 seconds he was doing calculations in his head and telling himself to keep going over the last small rise and then run downhill to the finish.
“It’s still sinking in, to be honest, but it’s just nice to get it done,” he said.
He described the final 2km as punishing and borrowed a line from his Norwegian rival, who likes to say “it’s worse to lose”. Wilde said, “so to hold on is something special for sure.”
The win settles a score that has followed Wilde for almost two years. In Taupō in December 2024 he led onto the run but, as Triathlete put it, took off too fast and misjudged his energy, and Geens came past him late. RNZ noted at the time that it had shades of the Paris Olympics earlier that year, when Britain’s Alex Yee overtook him on the run and Wilde took silver. In Nice, RNZ said, he timed his run perfectly.
After Taupō, Wilde told RNZ’s Morning Report he would step back from Olympic-distance racing for two years to give himself a mental break before building towards the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. He said in December 2024 that “for now I’ll experience the longer stuff, it’ll be nice to have a refresher.”
The longer stuff has not been straightforward. In May 2025 he was knocked off his bike by a truck on a training ride in Japan, suffering four broken ribs, a broken scapula and a punctured lung. The lung damage meant he could not fly home for several weeks. Three months later he won the T100 race in London, RNZ reported in August 2025, and he went on to win six of the seven T100 races he started that year and the 2025 T100 world title.
This season has been patchier. Triathlete magazine said a lung condition had hampered his training, which made the performance in Nice all the more striking. He opened the year with third at Ironman 70.3 Geelong in March and won T100 Singapore by more than six minutes in April.
Wilde was born in Taupō and grew up in Whakatāne, and only took up triathlon after watching it on television at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Since then he has won Olympic bronze in Tokyo, Olympic silver in Paris and Commonwealth Games silver in Birmingham in 2022, as well as the XTERRA world title in 2021.
The 70.3 world title adds another distance to that list. Triathlete pointed out that next year’s championship is in Chattanooga in the United States, and that Wilde still has Olympic qualification points to earn for New Zealand ahead of Los Angeles, where a gold medal would complete the set after bronze and silver.
The women’s world title, decided on Saturday on the same course, went to American Taylor Knibb.
Was this Hayden Wilde’s best win yet, ahead of his Olympic medals? And should he stay at the longer distances or head back to short course for Los Angeles? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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