Canadians earn pair of silvers at World Triathlon Cup in reopened Hawrelak Park

Finely tuned athletes tested their training this weekend in the World Triathlon Championship at Hawrelak Park. CTV News Edmonton's Curtis Goodrum has the story.

Canadians finished in the top 10 in all three races this past weekend at the World Triathlon tour stop at Edmonton’s Hawrelak Park.

The World Triathlon Cup in Alberta’s capital, one of 16 stops in the global series this year, saw Tyler Mislawchuk of Oak Bluff, Man., place second and Martin Sobey of Charlottetown seventh in the men’s elite race, Beatrice Filion of Candiac, Que., finish 10th on the women’s side, and the country’s mixed relay team grab silver.

The event Saturday and Sunday was the first time triathlon spectators returned to the city’s recently revamped river valley park in three years.

The 31-year-old Mislawchuk, a three-time Olympian, finished with a time of 52:20, 0.01 seconds behind winner Solomon Okrafo-Smark of Great Britain. Sobey, 29, followed nine seconds later (52:29).

The relay team, made up of Mislawchuk, Sobey, Isla Britton of Montreal and Sidney Clement of Victoria, put up a time of 1:22:24 to finish second to the winners from Italy (1:22:17). France came third with a time of 1:22:35.

Filion grabbed the final spot in the women’s Top 10 with a time of 1:00:33.

Individual triathletes swam 750 metres, cycled 20 kilometres along Emily Murphy Drive, Saskatchewan Drive and Groat Road, including the Groat Bridge, before returning to the park for a five-kilometre run to finish.

The relay consisted of a 300-metre swim in the Hawrelak Park lake, a 6.8-kilometre cycle trek in the river valley and 1.9-kilometre run back at the park.

The last triathlon competition held at Hawrelak before it closed for three years for extensive rehabilitation work was 2022’s Professional Triathlon Organization (PTO) Canadian Open.

The locale last hosted a World Triathlon Championship Series event in 2021, when it was the site of the World Triathlon Grand Final. The park had been pegged to host the grand final the year before, but World Triathlon cancelled the title event because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that, Hawrelak had hosted a stop on its annual series tour since 2014.

Kinsmen Park hosted stops on the Americas Triathlon Cup tour in 2024 and 2025.