Every Clydesdale and Athena Title: The Milwaukee Nationals Results

Phillip Young won three national titles in three days in Milwaukee. Ingrid Lofgren won two. At USA Triathlon's Sprint and Olympic Distance National Championships, held August 7 through 9, Young took the Clydesdale overall title in all three races and Lofgren the Athena overall title in both sprints. In Sunday's non-drafting sprint — a 750-meter swim in Lake Michigan off Discovery World, a 20-kilometer bike along Lincoln Memorial Drive, a 5k run through Veterans Park — Young finished in 1:11:05 and Lofgren in 1:13:55.

Photo by Marco de Pexels on Pexels

Every one of the three races scored the sport's two weight-based divisions — Clydesdale, for men 220 pounds and over, and Athena, for women 165 pounds and over. In Friday's draft-legal sprint, Young took the Clydesdale overall in 1:11:15, Collin Thompson the 39-and-under bracket in 1:24:49, and Lance Fargo of Reisterstown, Maryland, the 60-plus in 1:22:55; on the Athena side, Lofgren took the overall in 1:16:53, Wendee Brungardt the 40-54 in 1:36:21, and Caroline Faure the 55-plus in 1:35:45. Saturday's Olympic distance — 1,500-meter swim, 40-kilometer bike, 10k run — went to Young again in 2:26:37, with Jack Duncheskie taking the 39-and-under in 2:33:18 and Fargo the 60-plus in 2:28:58. The Athena overall went to Maggie Nilz in 2:54:15, with Marisa Fortin taking the 40-54 in 2:51:14 and Bridget Geboy-Helfenstein the 55-plus in 3:48:25.

Photo by Lucas Borges on Pexels

Sunday closed it out. Ryan Cavender won the Clydesdale 39-and-under in 1:12:24, Fortin the Athena 40-54 in 1:24:38 and Faure the Athena 55-plus in 1:33:39 — a second title of the weekend for each of Fortin and Faure. Fargo took the Clydesdale 60-plus in 1:18:54, his third in three days; he and Young were the only athletes to win a division title in all three races.

Photo by Brandic Digital on Pexels

USA Triathlon's three post-race releases don't say whether the divisions started as their own wave, so the answer has to come from the timing data — and it is there. All 51 division athletes in Sunday's sprint, 27 Clydesdale and 24 Athena, are recorded starting at 8:45:00 a.m., in a slot they shared with the non-binary open category, and all 51 recorded a finish. All 40 in Saturday's Olympic-distance race, 20 and 20, started at 7:25:02 a.m., again alongside the non-binary open category. Friday's draft-legal sprint was the exception: the 11 Clydesdale starters went off at 10:42:02 a.m. inside the wave the timing platform labels "M35-59, Clydes, NB, Open," and the nine Athena starters at 12:10:02 p.m. inside "F35-59, Athena." Ten of the 11 and eight of the nine finished.

This publication reported on August 8 that the designated wave was a first for the sport. The record does not support that. USA Triathlon has printed the same sentence on its nationals event page for years: Clydesdale and Athena athletes "will compete in their respective divisions for the championship races and will not start in age group waves." It appears on the 2023, 2025 and 2026 pages, and on the 2027 Des Moines page still. That language is not evidence that the wave ran in any particular year, which is precisely where our August 8 piece went wrong — it read a pre-race page as a description of a race. What settles the question is the timing data, and for 2025 the timing data shows the wave running. At the Olympic-distance race in Milwaukee that August, 15 Clydesdale men started together at 7:38:02 a.m. and 20 Athena women at 7:42:02 a.m., and none of 250 sampled age-group starters went off in either slot. The 2025 sprint never ran at all: USA Triathlon cancelled it after historic rainfall flooded the course and Milwaukee County declared a state of emergency. It refunded every entry and carried those athletes' qualification into 2026. Earlier years are different again: the divisions had no separate class in the 2024 Atlantic City timing roster, and at the 2023 Milwaukee championships — the same year the event page promised the wave — they existed only as a filter on the general age-group results.