All in Triathlon with Jelle Geens and Aaron Royle · All in triathlon

Non Stanford - The hidden cost of chasing gold

January 22, 2026·1 hr 22 min·75 clips

A relaxed catch-up opens with the podcast’s running "Alrighty guys" joke and a bit of self-mockery about how the show starts before settling into the kind of insider chat that only really works when everyone already knows the sport. The guests do not spend much time on ceremony. Instead, the conversation jumps straight to a 2012 under-23 world title in Auckland and the fact that the host and the guest both won their age-group worlds in the same year. That coincidence gets a laugh. From there, the discussion moves into the bigger question of what changes when an athlete steps from under-23 racing into the elite ranks, with the point made that the jump can look small on paper while still being brutally hard in practice. The senior world title comes up next. They treat it as the rare kind of back-to-back breakthrough that only really makes sense once you hear how much steady work and timing sits behind it, especially when the guest is one of the few women to back up an under-23 win with a senior crown the following year. A breakthrough fifth-place finish matters too. That result felt like a real turning point, and the hosts connect it to the post-breakthrough moment when the world-series field was deep and the race was already changing shape. The tone stays playful. The host teases out race decisions, throws in a few needling jokes about talent, and the guest answers in the same dry, practical register rather than turning the chat into a polished interview. It never gets overly tidy. The conversation is happier drifting through training years, race logistics, and the small details that make a season feel manageable or miserable before any medals are even on the table. That looseness helps. It gives the episode room to move from a simple results recap into something closer to a post-training debrief, where the reality of chasing a world title is measured in work, timing, and how often the body cooperates. The hosts keep circling back to who attacked, who had the legs, and how the course or the group dynamics changed the outcome, which keeps the whole thing grounded in racing rather than hero worship. The pressure is the point. By the end, the episode has made the case that chasing gold carries a cost that shows up in the years between medals, not just on the podium, and that is what gives the story its weight.

As heard by us

A candid triathlon chat about what a world title really costs.

All in Triathlon works best when it treats a world title as the beginning of the hard part, not the end of it. The conversation moves from the guest's under-23 world title in Auckland to the tougher work of holding that level at senior ranks, while the hosts keep things loose…

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