Lucy Byram has claimed 4th place at the T100 Las Vegas after sitting out a time penalty. The BMC athlete pushed her way to second place during the second half of the bike to battle it out on the run. She eventually crossed the finish line in a time of 3:45:27. Taylor Knibb (USA; 3:37:03) won the race convincingly with Julie Derron (SUI; 3:39:17) and Flora Duffy (BER; 3:44:04) completing the podium.
Lucy Byram toed the line of her fifth T100 event with confidence, coming off a strong 2nd place finish at Challenge Beijing a month ago. That confidence was immediately justified as Lucy exited the water as part of the first chase group, battling for 5th place. Exiting T1 on her bike, she was trailing the leaders by 1’25.
As Knibb took off at the front, Byram started to close down the gap towards the athletes in front of her. Just before making the connection around the 17k mark, Lucy had to serve a time penalty of one minute, because of alleged drafting. She dropped back from 5th to 7th place, but wasn’t faced by the situation. She immediately found her rhythm again and started to make up lost time. Around the 35k mark, Byram caught up with Findlay in 5th position, 1’30 behind second place. It was in the back half of the bike, where the 25-year-old made the difference. She took over 3rd place at the 50k mark and started to chase down Derron in 2nd. In the final 20k, Lucy made the connection with Derron. The BMC athlete pushed the pace some more towards T2 to open up a gap of 30 seconds as she jumped of her bike in 2nd place. With a time of 2:01:55 over 80k, the British athlete posted the second fastest bike split of the day.
On the run, Lucy saw Derron taking over soon. Byram kept her pace as high as possible on the hilly, punchy run course, but couldn’t prevent Duffy from chasing her down. With about 6k to go, Lucy had to settle for fourth place. She had a solid grip on that position as she held on to a gap of more than three minutes over 5th place. Eventually, Lucy Byram crossed the line in a time of 3:45:27, earning herself a fantastic 4th place. A result that gets her to 7th place in the season standings, going into the final in Dubai.
Getting stronger
Afterwards Lucy relfected on her fourth place finish: “I am really happy with finishing fourth today. It is my best result of this series so far. The swim was hard, but it felt good exiting the water in the first chase group. Unfortunately, I had to serve a penalty. I think, I received the penalty on the hill, where Paula passed me and I didn’t drop back enough, even though we were going uphill. I will just need to learn to drop back quicker, I guess. The run was obviously really hard, suffering through every lap and getting to the finish as fast as possible. Things and results in this series are going in the right direction for me. I am feeling like I am getting stronger in general. Not necessarily faster, but I am just fading less.”
