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Paul McNamara

Where National Games triathlon medals were once “not exceptionally hard to get”, a change in mindset in mainland China has significantly raised the bar for the Hong Kong athletes who will compete on Central Harbourfront in November.
And whereas before the country had “two or three good athletes in total”, Andrew Wright, the Hong Kong head coach, now expects every province to come armed with three high-calibre men and women.
According to Wright, an ailing China Triathlon Sports Association was warned it risked losing funding if none of its athletes directly qualified for last year’s Paris Olympics.
Lin Xinyu earned her place to assuage those fears, finishing 28th out of the 51 athletes in the women’s race, but the Olympic demand lit a fire under the sport’s bosses.
“They copied what happens everywhere else in the world, where coaches go into swim programmes and anyone not at the top level is switched into triathlon,” said Wright, who has been arguing for Hong Kong to follow suit since his appointment in 2020.
“We have so many swimmers who come to nothing, but it’s not happened here,” the 42-year-old said. “It feels political … but these are results for Hong Kong, and between the associations and Hong Kong Sports Institute [HKSI] we should be doing it.”

Hong Kong, meanwhile, had Jason Ng Tai-long as the city’s only representative, and he pulled out during the bike portion of the men’s race after struggling badly in the water.
Wright said even a “second-tier” swimmer could be “biking and running at a pretty high level within two years”.
“You’re producing an athlete in two years. We’re trying to get athletes at 10 or 12, and hope to see results 10 years later, it doesn’t work,” he added.
As a “tiny kid” who focused on swimming but “was never going to make it,” Wright talks from personal experience.
At 18, he was asked to enter a Hong Kong aquathlon selection race and duly beat all the city team athletes.
“I was on the verge of giving up all sport … but I had a new avenue to go down,” said Wright, who finished seventh at the 2006 and 2010 Asian Games.
It is a slight bugbear of Wright’s that he has “been told to some extent that it’s not my job to be involved in development … that I should be on the high-performance side”.
“Those things affect high performance,” he said. “You can throw as much money as you want at a programme, which is what we do, but if you don’t have the right talent moving into it, you’ll never get results.”

In addition to scouring swimming pools, Chinese triathlon has hired a number of overseas coaches.
“That knowledge makes a big difference … previously they only had province-based coaches and would train too hard,” Wright said.
Unlike in some Games sports, where the city’s athletes can expect to encounter hitherto unknown rivals, Wright said that regular continental cups meant his squad have “raced against and beaten everyone who will challenge for the podium”.
“We know who they are and what they’re good at … but it would not be productive to do an in-depth analysis of these people, because it would take the focus off what we want to do,” he said.
Wright also harboured no fears over the likelihood that some provinces would form alliances in the individual Games races on November 15.
“I don’t know how they’ll pull that off … our strategy is to blow the race up,” he said. “We’re going to swim and bike as hard as possible, get one or a couple of guys in a small group up the road, then no [competing] strategy matters, because you’re no longer part of the race.”
But with mainland triathlon in the ascendancy, there is a suspicion Hong Kong may have missed the boat in having only Daniel Lee Chi-wo’s 2009 bronze to show for their efforts over seven National Games since 1997.
Wright suspects not, given the relatively rich seam of talent coming through, and was even able to exclude Ng and Tallulah Wright, who finished 12th in the recent Asia Championships, from his squad.
In selecting Oscar Coggins, Robin Elg, Wong Tsz-to, Bailee Brown, Hilda Choi Yan-yin and Cade Wright, coach Wright said his squad depth was “significantly better than in the past”.

He acknowledged, however, that for a sport that has had HKSI Tier A funding for 30 years, essentially choosing from four men and four women was “a sad state of affairs”.
“We should have 20 men and 20 women competing for spots,” Wright said.
Along with looking in the city’s swimming pools for unearthed gems, Wright said that the “biggest potential change” would occur if the local school sports federation followed their international schools counterparts and added aquathlon to their competition programme.
“I’m pretty shocked it’s still not happening,” he said. “In a city of 7.5 million people, with the talent Hong Kong has, we have a world champion or an Olympic medallist somewhere, but we have to get the right person into our programme.
“People don’t need to start with triathlon, they can just swim and run. Hong Kong is an island surrounded by water, we have amazing facilities and trails. Triathlon should be one of our strongest sports … it would just take a few second-tier swimmers to switch over and we’d be laughing, and on the same trajectory as [mainland] China.”
Still, Wright expects to be picking from the same athlete pool for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
“There’s not much underneath, we have a few juniors kicking around, but you might see them performing in eight years,” he said.
“That doesn’t concern me … people in their mid-30s are winning Olympic medals. Whoever qualifies from Hong Kong this time should be aiming for top 20, but it would be bull**** to say we’re aiming for medals.”
That is not true of the National Games, where Wright said there would be more pressure on his athletes to deliver than at an Asian Games or the Olympics.
“We’re about to run the gauntlet, if we don’t get National or Asian Games medals, or people qualifying for the Olympics, we won’t be A-funded any more,” he said.
“Our committee has done a great job getting World Cups and the National Games here. It puts a spotlight on the sport and professionalises what we do because everyone can see it. It gets people interested, but what would help even more would be to score a significant result. That’s what we’re paid to do.”
A pre-Games altitude camp alongside their Liaoning province counterparts in Yunnan was designed to deliver Hong Kong’s triathletes to the start line “the fittest they’ve ever been, happy to be there, healthy and excited to race”.
In his current job, Wright takes inspiration from his grandfather, a former swimming coach whose charges included the Hong Kong-born, New Zealand 1988 Olympic bronze medallist Anthony Mosse.
“My grandfather died when I was 15, but he gave me a lot of motivation and a lot of pride in seeing how much people respected him,” Wright said.
“When I started coaching I always thought, ‘what would my grandfather have done here?’
“In terms of people management, I still think about how he would have approached different situations.”
Wright’s former athletes have been “very employable … because in industry they like the values elite sport creates in people”.
“Triathlon demands discipline, time management, resilience and grit,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s really difficult, it’s an absolute privilege.
“It’s amazing we get to do this, some people work in coal mines for eight to 10 hours a day. Triathlon is nothing compared to that.”


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Sport

Hong Kong

Head coach Andrew Wright says city is leaving talent untapped by not following mainland China’s lead in how to develop athletes


Head coach Andrew Wright says city is leaving talent untapped by not following mainland China’s lead in how to develop athletes.


Triathlon

Jason Ng Tai-long

Andrew Wright

2025 National Games: politics of performance leaves Hong Kong in danger of triathlon failure

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Head coach Andrew Wright says city is leaving talent untapped by not following mainland China’s lead in how to develop athletes

Head coach Andrew Wright says city is leaving talent untapped by not following mainland China’s lead in how to develop athletes