President's Welcome - Dr. Sarah Springman OBE

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We are celebrating a quarter of a century of triathlon racing in Great Britain this year. It is tremendous that our ‘lifestyle’ multisport has really come of age and is still full of such wonderful energy and growth. Today we have mass participation and elite events, clubs focusing on inclusive policies for all, new corporate sponsors, successful age group and elite teams and funded performance programmes as well.

In this first year since we have restructured to form the British Triathlon Federation, with our three members being the triathlon associations in England, Scotland and Wales, we combine our forces to offer exciting opportunities for you, their individual members. Over 500 events, including the Corus Elite Series and the Ranking Series, are listed, as well as details of all registered clubs and stimulating sections on every aspect of Development, Performance and ‘Operations’, as well as all of the nitty gritty information required to support you in your multisport endeavours. No longer do we hear the description from press and television that dogged us ‘way back then’ that we are a ‘gruelling sport’. This is our lifestyle sport, and it has changed the perceptions and lives of many people for the better, my own included. I am convinced that there are still many opportunities to be taken and I hope this website inspires you to make a contribution as well as to train and compete. Without the sponsors, race organisers, suppliers, referees, coaches, clubs, team managers, volunteers, staff and the Board members, we would be unable to enjoy our training, racing and all the wonderful advantages of looking extremely fit (and years younger) and enjoying the latest multisport fads and fashions too! We will also have a new CEO in place in early 2008, which will bring exciting new opportunities. Our ambitions for 2008 include a completely clean record in all anti-doping tests and full adherence to the UK Sport Whereabouts testing, combined with an Olympic triathlon medal or two from the course at the ChangPing reservoir in Beijing. The number of non-Olympic disciplines seems to grow annually too, and we will focus investment in duathlon and long distance triathlon, where we have current world champions and will consider extending into other formats too.

The Age Group Team is increasing in size, with record numbers signing up for the range of European and World Championships in 2008 – let’s see if we can better last year’s record haul of over 120 medals! Successful Corus Elite, Corus Kids of Steel and Ranking Series will be absolutely essential; as will achieving a measure of financial security over the coming years and improving our service to the BTF members and their members too. We also hope to hold a Corus Corporate Triathlon, and will be planning to hold a BG London World Cup event in Hyde Park in 2009, if not in 2008, as we look towards our home Olympic Games in 2012. Without our Premier Sponsors Corus, much of this innovation would have remained simply a dream. We are grateful for their trust and investment and look forward to the future together! In closing, who would have thought that those of us who dipped into Kirton’s Farm Lake in 1983 for the first leg, a wetsuit-free 1200m open water swim, would have been the original witnesses to the birth of such a powerful sporting movement in Great Britain? It has been an enormous privilege to have been part of growing our sport, from being outcast by the three individual disciplines in the very early days, to one with a fantastic palette of racing opportunities, with full recognition by the International Olympic Committee and the Commonwealth Games Federation too. The 2012 Olympics in London, the 2014 Commonwealth Games coming to Glasgow and multiple current world champions lay testament to exciting times ahead.