Maya Kingma

Maya grew up in Breda, Netherlands, where she had an active childhood following a love of horse riding, diving, judoka, football, life-saving, and swimming. In the latter, Maya found she had a real natural talent and described herself as being very technical as she was small with little strength. She reached national podium level as a junior over longer distances and graduated to open water. Her new coach encouraged Maya to do more conditioning work and suggested some mountain biking and running.

It was via this route that Maya found her way to triathlon almost by accident, but in only her fourth-ever race placed 13th in a Junior World Championship in New Zealand. However, her career was to go in fits and starts for a number of years due to persistent injuries caused by running. Even as she started to make waves as a junior, she was so badly injured she had two years on the sidelines. Maya was determined to come back but faced with such pain she was even struggling to swim let alone run, with her average mileage even after her comeback struggling to get above 10k a week without breaking down again. She moved to study at the University of Maastricht and left the Dutch National Training Centre as she realised she needed to find a training regime that would allow her to be competitive yet remain injury-free.

Maya put together a team of experts in each discipline to help provide the insight she needed and, by 2019, had her running volume up to 20-30k a week, still a long way short of her competition but a vast improvement.

Maya’s belief in her own individual process and mental strength has more than paid off. She ended 2020 and began 2021 with sixth and fifth-place finishes at the SLT Arena Games before her most notable results on the WTCS circuit. After a third place in the season opener in Yokohama, she produced the race of her life to take a maiden win at that level in Leeds.

Maya lives in Maastricht with her boyfriend, former cyclist Gijs Brouwer​.