Flora Duffy chases Olympic dreams in Stellenbosch

Stellenbosch is no stranger to Olympic gold. Champions train on the track at Coetzenburg or up in the nearby hills throughout the summer.

Few are as vested in the town as Flora Duffy, who won the women’s triathlon at the Tokyo Olympics (branded as 2020, but held in 2021). Now Duffy has been battling to be ready to defend her title in Paris next month.

Duffy is from Bermuda and is the island’s only Olympic gold medal winner. Her husband, Dan Hugo, is a former South African triathlete and their home life is divided between Stellenbosch and the rarefied air of Boulder, Colorado. 

The triathlon consists of a 1,500m swim, a 40km cycle and a 10km run. After their swim in the Seine on July 31, the athletes will take in sights including the Musée d’Orsay and the Champs-Élysées (with the Arc de Triomphe in their sights) during their cycle and run.

Duffy, 36, is a four-time Olympian who first competed at Beijing in 2008 at the age of 21, and whose gold medal came after paying her dues on the international triathlon circuit, winning the first of four world championships in 2016.

In the Tokyo Olympics, she slowly stripped away the field to run in on her own to gold. “I knew the swim was make or break, that if I wasn’t in that first group, there was no coming back. I know everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. And the races are definitely shaped by a very strong swim, and early selection of a breakaway on the bike,” she recalls of her Tokyo triumph.

She was in the top four by the end of the bike stage and not long into the final run, opened up a gap on the field. “I’ve led many big races before but there’s nothing like leading the Olympics,” she says. 

“But you also don’t really know what’s going to happen in the back half of a run in a triathlon. It was crucial to distract myself and break down the last five kays of the run. And, yeah, as the kilometres ticked by, I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to happen’ and only with about 1km left did I allow myself to let it slowly creep into my mind. It’s a weird sensation, you want it to be over. But at the same time, you’re like, ‘I might never get this moment again. So I need to soak it all up and enjoy it’.”

The reaction to her Olympic medal — particularly on her island — was more than she expected. “I never thought about what it would mean to so many people in Bermuda.”

In some ways, being Olympic champion does change your life, she says. “But then I think my daily life is still the same. At the beginning of the season, I’m quite unfit. I turn up to training and I get hammered in the pool ... I am the Olympic champion but I’m also just a normal human in a way.”

Tokyo was bizarre amid the pandemic. “Everything went perfectly from a race point of view. But I didn’t have my friends, my family, my sponsors, that sort of Olympic experience,” she says.

“That’s a big motivation to go back to Paris and to have everyone there, almost regardless of the outcome, just to see it as sort of a celebration of my career, getting to race at the Olympics, as a defending champion in front of everybody.”

A knee injury almost ended those hopes and has left her playing catch-up. She suffered a partial tear on her patellar tendon and recovery took longer than expected. She did not race for 18 months.

“My knee is good now, but it only sort of turned the corner in December. So then it takes quite a while to build up to appropriate training. It’s going to be a tight timeline to be in medal contention shape. But if everything goes smoothly, I can get there in good shape.

“It’s not an ideal situation. It means a very different build-up to what it was before Tokyo, where I was pretty confident and training had gone well.

“You want to be as consistent as possible with your training, and having a year of essentially not training properly is not ideal. It’s going to be interesting to see how it all comes back. But I’m going there with the intention of performing my best to try to win a medal. But, yeah, I’ve made it significantly harder for myself, right?”