For a self-confessed chilled-out Pacific islander, coming to terms with short-course swimming chaos has been a steep learning curve for Guam’s Manami Iijima.

We caught up with the Team World Triathlon athlete at the end of the 2025 season to catch up on a whirlwind rise through the sport to the biggest start line of them all.

From the development of triathlon in the Pacific region to the tough realities of learning the artform, the country's first ever Olympic triathlete rewinds over a fast-track route to Paris 2024 and her journey through the anxiety of an Olympic debut. Hear about those first international races as a wide-eyed solo traveller and the secret power of not over-thinking... and proudly representing a vast-yet-tiny corner of the Oceania continent.

>> The Lava Song (sadly without Manami's ukelele)

She went into the 2025 Championship Finals as the Series leader, knowing that victory would bring her a second world title in just three years and establish herself as an all-time great of British triathlon.

What transpired in Wollongong was hard to believe.

From the flying form of two wins in two leading to the Grand Final, to facing down an injury she knew was serious enough that her team might even advise her not to race, the story of those torrid four weeks in September and October 2025 is told by one of the toughest in the business.

It was ten years in the making, and the world title that Australia's Matt Hauser and his coach Dan Atkins were able to conjure up in 2025 was won in the perfect fashion: taking the tape, in Australia, in front of thousands, to give the home fans their first men's champion in 20 years.

But the path to the top never runs smoothly. The two close friends reminisce on the long, late conversations they had while locked down together during the pandemic that forged their future, the fuelling of Hauser's desire to become the best of the best, and curating a 2025 season which would unavoidably conclude with either the very highest of highs or the lowest low, at the end of a huge home Finals in Wollongong.

The 2025 season rewind continues with the newly crowned Men's U23 World Champion, Britain's rising star, Oliver Conway, joining the World Triathlon Podcast this week. Oli looks back over the processes and rapid progressions that helped him soar from Junior European Cups start lines to World Cup gold and WTCS debut power moves in the space of twelve short months, all the while juggling competition with training and the demands of studying at Nottingham University. 

"I think just last year, I can name maybe one or two races that were actually decent. I just think I got quite unlucky. I think that's probably why I went straight into not having an off-season and training straightaway, just because I was quite motivated to show what level I can race at. I just didn't really feel like I showed it last year. It was quite frustrating."

"That's probably half the reason why in at Worlds I tried to drive the pack, because I don't really wanna be known as someone who can win the race just from the run. I've obviously still got quite a bit to work in the swim because I'm nowhere near there, I just really try to work on all three and so I can be the sort of best and most complete triathlete I can be."

Richelle Hill lit the fuse on the 2025 World Triathlon Championship Finals Wollongong for the hosts Australia, igniting one of the great Grand Finals with the kind of finish that dreams are made of, hoovering up a seemingly unassailable gap to take the U23 world title in the most dramatic fashion.

She then went on a self-imposed social media lockdown ahead of the Mixed Relay, before finally reliving the moment back home in Brisbane, just one hint of the remarkable balance and level-headedness of an athlete coached by her mum, driven to succeed, and with a huge home Olympic Games lurking off on the horizon.

Notes:

4:20 - A winner's mentality & self-belief

7:25 - Finals preparation: not bang on

13:06 - The U23 Champs look-back

19:45 - Watching back the final moments with the champ

32:30 - Olympian Rina Hill: mum as coach and mentor

40:45 - Passing the torch - Richelle as coach?

Join us for a special on-the-ground preview of the Championship Finals from Wollongong, Australia with Chelsea Burns and Tommy Zaferes, analysing the chances of favourites Matt Hauser, Cassandre Beaugrand and Beth Potter and what it will take for their closest rivals to stop them

Fresh from his mammoth debut World Triathlon Championship Series win in Karlovy Vary, Germany's latest triathlon talent Henry Graf joins Doug Gray and Tommy Zaferes for a full run-down of the latest and greatest Battle of Bohemia!

📈 Being nearly two metres tall in an era of smaller, faster triathletes

🍿 Winning your debut the same day as Ironman short-distancers light up Nice – shouts to Casper Stornes, Gustav Iden, Kristian Blummenfelt and friend Jonas Schomburg

💪 Taylor Spivey’s mega bike effort to catch onto Maya Kingma’s mega bike effort

🐠 Oliver Conway’s impressive debut with 4th place new talent coming off the GB production line

💥 Beth Potter back on top of the podium and Jeanne Lehair bouncing back from bashing the barrier

🦿 Hitting the KV roads hard with breakaway boys Tjebbe Kaindl and Mark Devay

✍️ Hayden Wilde’s pre-race car incident, Swim behaviour penalties, John Reed clocking the rapid runs, prospects for a Series podium and his chances of taking Csongor Lehmann’s crown in Tiszy

Third in the world heading to WTCS Karlovy Vary on 14 September, it was in the south of France last weekend that Jeanne Lehair ripped up her coach's notes and took the race to Cassandre Beaugrand at WTCS French Riviera.

Photographer Tommy Zaferes is back on the podcast this week as we pick through the ashes of that race and look ahead to the penultimate action of the Series ahead of the Championship Finals Wollongong, where the moves were made that decided things in Frejus and the 'what if' of whether Jeanne could she have found one more push to hold off the Olympic Champion in her back yard.

The newly crowned European Sprint Triathlon Champion, Belgium's Jolien Vermeylen is one of the sport's great characters, and heads to Istanbul at the end of August chasing a huge continental double with the Olympic Distance title.

On episode 105, the 31-year-old opens up about having her post-Paris 2024 words twisted and the pain of a resulting social media pile-on, putting her 70.3 ambitions on hold to chase a career-best Series ranking in 2025 and soaking in the arc of taking up the sport after reading the Brownlee book on holiday in Corfu and then winning supertri gold for Brownlee Racing in Toronto a decade later.

"You can read subtitles on my face. If I like something I show it and if I don’t you’ll know it. But maybe for racing I need it!"

In recovery after suffering a bad bike crash at WTCS Hamburg in mid-July, Roksana Slupek is our guest this week, and the Poland number one shares her reflections on the highs and lows of her journey to the Paris 2024 Olympic start line.

From attacks of self doubt and depression to ultimately qualifying for her life’s dream, and the harsh realities of racing on – and crashing out of – the world’s biggest triathlon series, the 26-year-old shares an eye-opening hour of life as an elite athlete, and how recent events have made her re-evaluate her attitude towards her fellow competitors on the World Triathlon Championships Series.