OLLIE Turner admitted that he could have ‘no excuses’ as he watched his training mate, Guernsey’s Josh Lewis, put in a near-perfect race to romp home in the men’s triathlon.
The Jerseyman can take solace from the team gold he helped secure and the individual silver he earned after edging a hard-fought battle with Isle of Man’s Will Draper. The efforts of Turner, Tom Atkinson, Dave Holmes, Jack Kennedy and Richard Tanguy pushed Guernsey into second in the team event.
But this was Lewis’s race. From the moment the triathletes hit the water he was gone, leaving Turner and Draper to fight it out over the remaining podium spots, as they swapped positions on the bike and run until eventually Turner made the decisive move.
Lewis had time to soak up the electric atmosphere as he came down the finish stretch with the home crowd roaring him on.
Turner said: ‘I’ve got no excuses, I just wasn’t good enough today. Josh was incredible. Just from the start, I didn’t even see him. I thought I was leading to the first buoy, I looked left and he was that far ahead I couldn’t even see him.
‘I knew as soon as I saw the gap go in the swim that it was going to be near to impossible to catch up on the bike – the guy’s a bullet on the bike. He’s just got power that I do not have.
‘I’ve been focusing purely on the run this year. Because I’m doing most of the World Tour stuff, if you can’t run fast, there’s no point really. I think I showed today I ran well, but my bike legs are somewhere back in 2019.’
For Lewis it was a case of keeping calm on the run and managing the distance to his competitors.
‘By the last lap, I saw the gap wasn’t coming down too much and I could relax and enjoy the atmosphere,’ he said. ‘I can’t put into words how much it means to me that so many people turned up.
Draper said it was a tough battle with Turner.
‘I knew both Josh and Ollie would have good swims. I unfortunately had a bit of a rough swim, I had quite a lot of salt water come up in the goggles. But these things happen. Credit to Josh and Ollie on their performances.’
Atkinson was unfortunate to miss out on the podium in the individual race but his fourth-place finish went a long way to securing the team gold.
Guernsey took silver in the team event, with Isle of Man in third.
The first three members counted towards the overall times.
