Home|Sports|Roach happy with triathlon team’s performanceSports
BTA looking to improve for next year
Simba FrenchSend an emailAugust 30, 2023 71 2 minute readFacebookTwitterLinkedInShare via Email
The 5th CARIFTA Triathlon and Aquathlon is in the books and the Bahamas Triathlon Association’s president, Dorian Roach was happy with Team Bahamas’ performance, which was the best The Bahamas ever did.
The championship was held at Goodman’s Bay in New Providence this past weekend.
“We performed the best we ever have,” Roach said. “We’re hoping that we got in the top three and we did. We got six medals. Our previous best was four medals. We got our first ever gold medal. We’re really happy about that. It’s definitely our best performance ever and we’re happy and we’re very proud of our team.”
The Bahamas was able to secure the third-place finish and secure one gold, three silver and two bronze. Barbados was the overall winner, while Bermuda was second.
Lauchlan Menzies made history by winning the first gold medal ever for Team Bahamas in the 11-12 boys triathlon. His older brother, Malcolm Menzies followed suit later, with a silver medal in the 13-15 boys triathlon. Ralph Wood Jr. won two silver medals in the 21-and-under division triathlon and aquathlon. Erin Pritchard won a bronze medal in the 16-19 girls triathlon, while Grace Farrington won bronze in the 16-19 girls aquathlon.
Triathlons and aquathlons have picked up some momentum in terms of attracting new athletes. Roach said the sporting events have been growing.
“We’ve been working over the many years as an association to build the program up. Each year, we get more and more kids. We try and improve our training. We try and improve the events that we have. We try to build on the clubs. We have two clubs now, so we’re trying to attract people to the sport and to take the sport more seriously as a full-time sport, rather than just something else that the kids do. We have a lot of swimmers that also do it. We have a lot of runners that also do it. We’re trying to encourage people to be full-time athletes and I think doing that will help us a lot.”
Roach said this year’s competition is a step in the right direction and he hopes to add some more depth to the older divisions.
“We need a little more depth in some of the age groups like our 16 to 21, or specifically 19 to 21. We only had one male and we had no females. We need to look on how do we retain the kids as they get older instead of them dropping out. How do we keep them in the sport longer is definitely something we need to look at. As for our coaching structure, we’d like to try and see if we can get a full-time national team coach, rather than just selecting a coach a couple of weeks before the event. I think that’ll help us too.”
The two strong portions for The Bahamas were the swimming and the cycling events. The running was not as strong as those portions, but Roach said they will look into making it stronger in the future.
“They are good runners, but obviously, there are better runners out there,” Roach said. “I think overall, that’s probably our weakest point – the run. We have some very strong swimmers. We have some strong bikers. Our running is, I think, as a team, for sure, our running is probably the least best that we have. We need to look at possibly doing some more track sessions, bringing in a track-specific coach to help us out with that.”
The 6th edition of the competition is set to be held in Barbados.