IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship 2024: How to watch live, date, start time and preview as Knibb targets threepeat

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IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship 2024: How to watch live, date, start time and preview as Knibb targets threepeat

Four years later than originally planned, Taupo finally hosts the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championships this week.

The global COVID pandemic meant New Zealand couldn’t host its first World Championships in 2020 but the wait is now over and it comes right at the end of what has been the most packed middle and long-distance pro season ever.

Both the T100 and the IRONMAN Pro Series – of which this is the deciding race – have brought the world’s best together time and again during 2024. And the women’s race – especially – in Taupo is a fitting finale.

Taylor Knibb (USA) is bidding for a 70.3 Worlds three-peat and comes here as the newly-crowned T100 champion. Not surprisingly she’s the world number one but the three women closest to her in those rankings – Ashleigh Gentle (AUS), Julie Derron (SUI) and Kat Matthews (GBR) all line up, with Matthews also looking to wrap up the $200,000 first prize in the IRONMAN Pro Series.

Read on to find out more as we focus on the women’s race which will take centre stage on Saturday.

How to watch, start times and live tracking

The race takes place on Saturday December 14. The women’s pro race will begin at 07:00 local time. That corresponds to 18:00 in the UK, 13:00 Eastern Time and 10:00 on the West Coast of the US – all of those on Friday December 13.

Nearer the time, live coverage will be embedded below so you don’t have to leave this page but for now we’ve got the pre-race press conference which takes place on Thursday morning local time.

And coverage will be also broadcast for free across multiple platforms for global viewers including proseries.ironman.com, DAZN, YouTube, Sky Sport Now in New Zealand, Outside TV exclusively for the U.S. and Canada, L’Équipe Live in France, iQIYI in China and beIN Sports for the Middle East, North Africa and Asia-Pacific regions.

The ever reliable IRONMAN Tracker is the perfect data addition to the live coverage too, whether for the pro races or following friends or family in the age-group events.

Pro Women

There’s no doubt at all about the overwhelming favourite – that’s American superstar Taylor Knibb who has run away with the last two editions of the 70.3 Worlds.

She won by over five minutes in St George in 2022 and then last year in Lahti, Finland, she was four minutes to the good.

And she comes here on the back of a perfect middle-distance campaign, which started off with victory at 70.3 Oceanside and has featured four out of four in the T100, including the Grand Final in Dubai last time out.

Taylor Knibb wins IRONMAN 70.3 World Championships 2023 — Taylor Knibb celebrates her Lahti win in 2023 [Photo Credit – Nigel Roddis Getty Images for IRONMAN]

Australian Ashleigh Gentle had been seen as her biggest rival – at least at PTO / T100 level – but she hasn’t been able to land a blow this season despite being #2 in the rankings.

Take Knibb out of the equation though and her season would look very different – and this is also her first blast at the 70.3 Worlds.

Julie Derron has made an instant impact at middle-distance since winning a silver medal for Switzerland in the women’s individual race at the Olympics – with three successive T100 second places, all of them behind Knibb.

Kat Matthews has been one of the few athletes able to successfully combine the IRONMAN Pro Series and the T100 and only a highly unlikely set of circumstances will scupper her hopes of the overall title in the former.

That should mean she can focus on going for the win – she was an impressive second in Lahti last year and the nature of this Taupo course, more of which below, looks similar.

Those are the standout four but it’s a huge field – click here for full start list – and as the men’s 70.3 Worlds showed last year, anything can happen on the day. All the more so this year given the elongated calendar and the fact that for many athletes this race is taking place on the other side of the world.

The 2022 runner-up Paula Findlay (CAN), up-and-coming Caroline Pohle (GER), Ellie Salthouse (AUS) and Solveig Løvseth (NOR) are four other names who will have podium ambitions if the favourites falter.

The course

Poor water quality has been an unwanted theme for the sport in 2024, thankfully not here.

For the 1.9-kilometre swim takes place in the pristine waters of Lake Taupo. The point-to-point course sees athletes diving into the water by the Taupo Yacht Club, heading straight for 300m before turning left and swimming parallel to the shoreline for 1200m. One more left turn brings athletes out on the shore opposite Kaimanawa Reserve, the location of T1. To get there, first athletes must run over a footbridge to reach their bike.

Athletes will then embark on a 90-kilometre, single loop bike course with plenty of rolling hills and punchy climbs, as well as New Zealand’s infamous chip-seal road surface. Along State Highway 5 athletes will cross the Waikato River for a second time before as they begin their journey back into town and into T2.

The 21.1-kilometre run course features two laps along the Taupo lakefront.

IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship 2024 prize money

The prize purse for the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championship in 2024 stands at a total of $500,000 with the winners taking home $75,000 each for their efforts.

The prize breakdown is as follows:

$75,000
$45,000
$30,000
$19,000
$15,000
$12,000
$10,000
$8,000
$7,500
$7,000
$6,000
$5,000
$4,000
$3,500
$3,000

IRONMAN Pro Series: What’s on the line?

As we’ve mentioned earlier, as part of the IRONMAN Pro Series athletes will also earn points as they seek to become the IRONMAN Pro Series Champion and win a share of the $1.7 million bonus prize purse.

Matthews effectively just needs to avoid a DNF to seal top spot but the top six in the series standings will all line up.

In Taupo, the maximum possible score will be 3,000 points for 1st place, with points for all remaining professional finishers diminishing based on the time deficit to first place, at a rate of 1 point per 1 second deficit to the winner’s finishing time.