70.3 World Champion Jilly Janes Aims for 2026 Kona Win – Triathlete

Jelle Geens kicks off his 2026 season this weekend at Ironman 70.3 Geelong as Two-time defending Ironman 70.3 World Champion And with a chance to make history later this year. No man has ever won three Ironman 70.3 titles. However, the tournament that most appeals to the Belgian is one he has never competed in before: the IRONMAN World Championships in Kona.

This tension is at the heart of Jeans’ 2026 season. On the one hand, the 32-year-old has a chance to do something no man has accomplished at Ironman 70.3 Worlds (Daniella Reeve and Taylor Knipp have won five and three women’s titles, respectively). On the other hand, the lure of Kona overshadows this ambition.

“It’s going to be great,” says Janes. “I think I’ll be the first man ever to do it. But that doesn’t add much value to me, winning another 70.3 title. I’d rather, if I could choose, win an Ironman world title.”

It’s a revealing thing for the reigning hero to say. She’s also honest.

The unconventional path to triathlon world champion

Geens never reached that point as an instant 70.3 star. He has spent more than a decade in short track racing, building a strong if sometimes uneven career at the World Triathlon Championships (WTCS) and qualifying to race for Belgium in three Olympic Games. However, it is only in the last two years, with a focus on the middle distance, that he has found the consistency that turns a very good athlete into a world champion. However, just as he has become the man to beat the 70.3 distance, he is choosing to complicate matters.

Janes’ path into the sport was not particularly linear. He grew up in Belgium playing football, then moved to track and field because his cousin played it. He got into road cycling too, but triathlon didn’t come into the picture until he was 15 and on a family holiday in Spain.

“I was a little interested in athletics,” he recalls. “And I randomly said on vacation: ‘I think I’m going to do a triathlon.’

It wasn’t just talk. Jens started swimming that vacation, doing freestyle laps at the resort pool in the morning. His father had competed in triathlon before Jens was old enough to remember it clearly, so the sport wasn’t entirely unfamiliar. However, he was starting from scratch in many ways, especially in the water.

“I could swim, or do freestyle, but I was not good at all,” he laughs.

This quickly became clear. He started swimming with his old father Triathlon clubHe then joined a swimming club, and later joined a better club when he realized that the first preparation was not good enough. This seems to change things. “This is the winter I made a lot of progress in my swimming,” says Janes. “And the competition started getting more up front.”

The rise came quickly. By 2011, just a few years after deciding he wanted to become a triathlete, Jens finished second at the European Junior Championships.

This result was significant enough to make him take the sport seriously. He also came to a crossroads: He wanted to go to university, but he also wanted to see where triathlon could go. In Belgium, elite athletes can split their university year over two years, and Jens took that route. He continued his studies while racing and training at a high level, eventually earning a degree in engineering in 2022.

“I spent four years in about 11 years,” he smiles. “I definitely had to study for it. It was a lot of work.”

This combination of patience and perseverance probably says as much about Jeans as any of his race results. After all, his short career wasn’t a clean upward trajectory.

“I had no consistency in my races,” says the Belgian. “I could have had a really good race for me at the time, but then I also had a lot of bad races.”

Some of that is due to the type of physique he had at the time. Looking back now, he could see how light his training was compared to the current levels. “If you did 15 to 18 hours of training, it was a good week,” he points out. “Now I’m basically doubling down!”

Swimming can still leave him chasing. Running, which should have been an obvious carryover from his athletic background, didn’t always translate as well, especially because he never really learned how to run well off the bike. There were flashes of success – a podium finish in the European Cup, then an eighth-place finish in the Grand Final in Chicago in 2015 – but it took a long time before Jens found success.

However, those early results were significant, especially in Belgium, where short-course triathlon did not have a deep history at the top level. “In Belgium, finishing eighth in the grand final was seen as a good result,” admits Jens. “No one has done that before.”

However, the real breakthrough came later. In the fall of 2016, Jens joined coach Joel Filiol’s training group and entered a more demanding environment, training alongside the likes of Mario Mola and Vincent Luis. But the benefits were not immediate. The level was different. The size was different. It took time to accommodate the new load.

“Because I pretty much never trained much with Joel, it took me a while to really get used to it.”

Only in early 2019 did he start to feel like he truly belonged in that company. “It was only in January 2019 that I really felt like I could manage most of the sessions with Mario and Vincent,” he recalls.

The results came that summer: Geens won WTCS Montrealbecoming the first Belgian to win a WTCS race, then backing it up a week later with a bronze medal in Hamburg. The results were important, of course, but what changed internally was perhaps even more important.

“From then on, I thought I could win races at the highest levels,” he says. “Before, I didn’t have that confidence yet.”

If Montreal was the moment when Jeans began to believe in himself as a front-runner athlete in the WTCS, his Olympic career was a bit more complicated. He competed in Rio in 2016, but not in the way he had hoped. Meanwhile, Tokyo was even more painful. Jens tested positive for COVID-19 before traveling and was unable to compete in the individual race, only arriving in Japan in time for the mixed relay after ultimately testing negative.

“Every day I went to this laboratory,” he explains. “(The results) would always come back in the middle of the night, and I wouldn’t sleep well, and they would always come back positive.”

The Belgian team finished fifth in the relay, a respectable result, but overall, this was not the Olympic experience Jens wanted. And then, he still had enough faith (and unfinished business) to keep Paris in sight. He won the WTCS Abu Dhabi Championship that fall and had a strong season in 2022. But by winter as the 2024 Olympic year approached, his motivation had waned.

“I was struggling a little bit and wasn’t sure if I wanted to do it in Paris, or if I wanted to do it because Tokyo was a very bad experience,” he says.

This honesty is revealing. It also helps explain the shift towards middle-distance racing as less of a gamble. He had already dropped to 70.3 before Paris, racing at Indian Wells and later at Oceanside. He has always been strong during long training sessions. He trusted his bikepacking group. The appeal was not difficult to understand.

“I guess I always thought I could be good at it,” he smiles. “How good it is, I didn’t really know.”

Personal reset and double 70.3 world titles

What followed perhaps exceeded even his own expectations. After Paris, Jens switched coaches and moved to work with them Ben Russell. He and his family also left Girona for Australia’s Gold Coast, a move that changed his training environment and his surrounding family life. His training has changed in obvious ways: more emphasis on the TT bike, less swimming once a week, and a structure that separates hard from easy more clearly than under his previous coach.

“With Joel, every week builds and builds and builds on,” Janes explains. “There aren’t really any easy days or weeks out there. With Ben, the big days are really big and the easy days are really easy.”

But the larger reset feels more personal. By the end of his short career, Janes felt that he “really needed a change. … I didn’t enjoy being a professional triathlete anymore.”

And Australia seems to have given him more normalcy: more life outside of sport and time with family, with less time in the triathlon bubble.

“Triathlon is important, it’s a big part of our lives, but there’s so much more to it than just triathlon,” says Janes.

This version of Janes – more stable and less consumed – turned out to be his best version at the competitive level. In Taupo, it is He won the Ironman 70.3 World Championship In his first full season of committing to the distance. In Marbella, he defended the title in a race that included a crash, a bike problem, and a fast race finish with 2020 Olympic champion Christian Blumenfelt. If Taupo announced the arrival of Jens as a middle-distance star, Marbella confirmed it.

Janes still talks about Taupo racing in terms of how quickly it is changing. At one point, he thought second place was the likely outcome. Then suddenly the bullets were there. “Within about five minutes, I was like, Oh wait, I’m driving this!‘ he recalled with a look of surprise.

What stood out as much as the victory itself was the people he shared it with: partner Kate; Their daughter, Sienna. Both sets of parents; his cousin; And his coach. “It was really nice to be able to share it with all these people.” This seems to be what Jens enjoys most about this part of his career. Victories feel more personal. More connected to the life he built around the sport. Less associated with a training or union setting.

Measured campaign to win Kona

So why not just stay there? Why don’t we focus on the third title that makes history 70.3? Because, for Jens, that’s not what drives him forward anymore. He admits that his coach initially wanted him to narrow down to the triple-peat: “I had to convince my coach a little bit, but for me, it wasn’t enough to fully motivate me. I really want to do an Ironman this year.”

The track starts with qualifying. Janes will open his season in Geelong, then plans to race Ironman Texas four weeks later, hoping to land his Kona ticket. If all goes as planned, his schedule will be deliberately kept light: likely T100 San Francisco, or Ironman 70.3 Happy Valley, then 70.3 Worlds in Nice, and finally Kona four weeks later. The Geelong/Texas double is an obvious dress rehearsal for a championship season.

Only those six races are on the plan at the moment, and that’s no coincidence. Jens knows that he is not the type of athlete who easily recovers from back-to-back races. “If I try to race too much, or too close together, my form goes down,” he explains. “I’m not one of those people who, if I race, can go out the next day and train hard again.”

This self-awareness is a big part of the reason why his 2026 campaign looks serious rather than reckless. He doesn’t chase Pro series. He’s not chasing the T100 series.

“I like to really train for an event and then perfect it,” he says.

However, the challenge is clear. Nice and Kona are only four weeks apart. The Texan, the first Ironman of his career, comes before either. And according to Gaines, Texas will tell him a lot — perhaps everything — about how realistic his goals are for this year.

“I like to believe that I can compete in Kona and get a win right away,” he admits. “But it’s really hard to say you’ve never done it.”

There are plenty of reasons to believe he can compete in the IRONMAN World Championship. It handles heat well. He believes in his combination of running and bike, especially his ability to run well on a very powerful bike. This may or may not be enough to win Kona outright. Jens is ambitious, but he is not naive. He realizes it may take some time. It may take more than one time. But he also knows he doesn’t want to wait forever to find out.

“I don’t see myself racing until I’m 42 or something,” he says. “Until I achieve the goal of winning Kona, I think this is what will motivate me.”