Three cheers for Edmontonian Paul Tichelaar who will be representing Canada at the Beijing Olympics this summer. The world championships were held on Sunday in Vancouver and Paul needed to place top 8 to guarantee his slot for the Olympics. He missed top 8 by 0.7 seconds but this morning Triathlon Canada made their final selection and weren’t totally stupid, they sent what I expected to be the team over to Beijing. Simon Whitfield and Paul Tichelaar will be representing Canada along with the help of Colin Jenkins who will probably race with a domestique strategy to help the others on the bike ride if at all possible by breaking wind and helping out here and there with strategy.

These guys really did a good job yesterday, racing the kind of race that is likely to be seen at Beijing with essentially everyone getting off the bike together. The swim was cold though and there’s essentially no chance that there will be wetsuits at Beijing. At any rate, the guys with good swim and run strength fared well. Essentially everyone rode under 1 hour for 40 kms which is pretty sweet. The run musn’t have been as easy as other courses as Docherty and Gomez were the only people to run under 32 minutes for 10k.