Jelle Geens and Natalie Van Coevorden have claimed the men’s and women’s professional titles at IRONMAN 70.3 Geelong, with both athletes impressing on their way to victory in the opening round of the 2025 IRONMAN Pro Series.
Geens, from Belgium, picked up where he left off when he was crowned IRONMAN 70.3 World Champion in New Zealand last December, crossing the line first in 3:33:23, while for Australia’s Van Coevorden it was a first ever IRONMAN 70.3 race win, claiming the women’s title in 4:05:58.
Geens came home 45 seconds clear of a fast-finishing Jake Birtwhistle, with New Zealand’s Tayler Reid rounding out the podium, with Geens taking home the maximum 2,500 IRONMAN Pro Series points.
“I’m stoked of course, it’s good to start the season with a win, it was a hard fought win for sure, because I wasn’t 100 percent sure how I was going to feel because I got sick a couple of weeks ago and then my partner got sick and it was very busy with the baby but luckily we had a lot of help from her family, but then in the end I actually felt really good but I needed it today because the guys were on fire.
“There was Aaron Royle and Matt Hauser who are two of the best swimmers in the world so they kept an honest pace on the swim but I was very happy that I actually came with them out of the water and was in the front straight away. I tried to really push from kilometre 15 to kilometre 30 on the bike but you could really see that it was too hard to really make a gap and break people so then I decided to not spend too much energy and really focus on that run,” said Geens. “The second lap of the bike was quite a bit faster which hurt some people’s legs, maybe quite a bit. I then set out on quite a fast pace on the run, the ITU boys kept following, I guess they think it’s quite a chilled pace to keep for a couple of kilometres but then I got a gap and I slowly increased it and I could start running my pace that I knew I felt I could do for the 21k.”
The pace was on early in Geelong, with just 19 seconds covering the top 12 men following the 1.9km swim, with Geens exiting the water in ninth. The triple Olympian hit the front of the pack on the bike course, controlling the pace, before Australia’s Ben Hill pushed ahead to return to transition first, 14 seconds up on Geens.
The early stages of the run were fast and furious, with the top 10 all within touching distance of each other, and after 3.5km Geens, Birtwhistle, Japan’s Kenji Nener and Reid were all covered by less than a second. From there Geens lifted the pace, opening up a lead over Nener and Reid, who ran shoulder to shoulder for much of the 21.1km. Birtwistle stayed close throughout the middle stages of the run before making his move, working his way up to second ahead of Reid.
In the women’s race Natalie Van Coevorden claimed a breakthrough win, with the Australian Olympian finishing less than 30 seconds clear of New Zealand’s Hannah Berry, with Melbourne’s Grace Thek third, extending her impressive run of podiums in Geelong to eight in a row.
“I’m pretty ecstatic to be honest, you’re not going to hold up the banner too many times in your career and holding up an IRONMAN 70.3 one so early in my switch is really special, everything played out how I wanted it to today and it couldn’t have gone any more perfectly to be honest,” said Van Coevorden. “We had a pretty fast swim and had a bit of a gap, I had a plan to ride pretty hard for the first 10k so I could gap the field a little bit, we then had four girls on the bike working pretty well together and then I paced the run to perfection today, I really loved the undulation on the run course, it really kept me focused, I couldn’t ask for anything more.
“Hannah was probably sitting 10 to 20 seconds ahead for that first eight to nine k and then it finally just came down in a k that gap, I just told myself to keep running, you don’t need to do anything special and it paid off in the end and I ran the best race I could,” she said. “At IRONMAN 70.3 Melbourne in 2022 I lost it with a k to go and I really made a focus on my nutrition today, that’s been a big switch from short course racing and I think I really played it the best I could.
But it was almost a win that didn’t happen for Van Coevorden after starting the day unwell.
“I was messaging my coach, my mum, my boyfriend, saying should I start, should I not start, and they all said back yourself, you’ve had a really good block of training and you’re probably fitter that you think and I think all those years of racing, 13, 14 years of doing triathlon now really paid off today because my body just knew what to do when I needed it most,” she said.
New Zealand’s Teresa Adam, a multiple-time IRONMAN champion, was first out of the water, just ahead of Van Coevorden, with Hannah Knighton and Hannah Berry third and fourth respectively.
Van Coevorden hit the front early in the 90km ride, and was joined at the front by Berry, three-time IRONMAN race winner Regan Hollioake, Adam and Knighton. The top five pushed ahead, swapping positions a number of times across the two laps. Berry was first back into transition, just ahead of Hollioake, Adam and Van Coevorden.
Berry, the reigning IRONMAN Asia-Pacific champion and a former winner in Geelong, pushed ahead early on the run but Van Coevorden didn’t let her out of her sight, moving into the lead after eight kilometres and then controlling the pace from there to go on to take her first IRONMAN 70.3 race win and the maximum 2,500 IRONMAN Pro Series points. Berry crossed the 29 seconds behind, with Thek powering through the run to move up finishing the ride seventh to end the race on the podium.
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