IN THE Swiss town where he won the junior title eight years ago, Tim Don yesterday put behind him a season of wretched luck to upset the odds and win the senior World Championship in Lausanne. On a weekend of extraordinary success for the Great Britain, the national men’s team took all three gold medals, winning the junior and under-23 races as well.
Don, the son of Phillip Don,the former World Cup referee, had not been rated among the contenders, having failed to win an international race all season. Although he took the national title, he managed only seventh place at the European Championships and failed to finish his home World Cup race in Salford.
Yet Don, 28, remained convinced that an outstanding performance was waiting to come out. He had suffered a stomach upset at the European Championships and, having missed a chair as he was sitting down and hurt his coccyx, forcing him to rest from training before Salford, he had his reasons for not making his mark earlier in the season.
“Lots of people had been looking at my season and I had not managed to put everything together in one race,” Don said. “But things had gone right in certain aspects. Training has gone fantastically and I knew that all the tools were there — I just needed to access them.”
Which is precisely what Don managed yesterday.
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After emerging from the 1,500 metres swim in the lead pack, Don became detached from the front group on the 40 kilometres ride. Rather than wait and hope, he made a bold move out of the chasing group and caught the leaders. As the front riders piled on the pace, with Don now among them, so the second group became more detached.
Come the 10 kilometres run, such was the gap to the chasing group that they had lost all hope of retrieving ground. Don and Hamish Carter, from New Zealand, soon pulled away from Frédéric Belaubre, from France, the European champion, with the Briton stamping his authority over Carter in the last five kilometres.
With the finish in sight, Don had a clear lead and permitted himself a victory dance as he approached the line. “It is the race that everybody wants to win and I am really chuffed,” Don said. “My goal is to defend my world title next year. I cannot believe I am saying that.”
Britain have to go back to 1998 for their last senior men’s world champion, Simon Lessing. Don is only the third British holder of the title, after Lessing and Spencer Smith. It was Smith who inspired Don to take up the sport when he might so easily have been lost permanently to football.
Courtesy of his father, the young Don had sat in some of the finest directors’ boxes in English football, but there is no place in the sport like the champion’s chair. Four years after Don Sr had gone to the United States in 1994 as England’s only referee at the World Cup finals, his son became junior world champion.
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A footballer for school and borough, Don Jr recalls sitting among the directors at Old Trafford, Highbury and Elland Road, yet the Robsons and Inces, Winterburns and Wrights were not his heroes. He wanted to be like Smith, his near neighbour in Twickenham.
For Corus, the new sponsors of the Britain team, the weekend could hardly have gone better. Alistair Brownlee won the junior title and Will Clarke was runaway winner of the under-23 gold medal. Clarke won with such ease that he managed a cartwheel and somersault as he crossed the line.
PUTTING BRITAIN BACK IN WITH ELITE
TIM DON’S victory in the World Championships yesterday returned Great Britain to the top of the podium after a lean period in which its reputation as the world’s strongest nation had been dismantled.
After the 1990s domination of Spencer Smith and Simon Lessing, with five world titles between them, Britain had not won the men’s elite global crown since 1998.
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When triathlon made its Olympic debut at Sydney 2000, Lessing was the favourite but he fell short. After two Olympics, Britain is still awaiting a first medal, Leanda Cave having raised hopes in 2002, when she became the nation’s first women’s world champion.