Tyler Mislawchuk

Super League regular Tyler Mislawchuk made a great decision in putting aside his ice hockey ambitions to pursue his career as a professional triathlete. The Winnipeg native was a huge fan of ice hockey as a youngster and played to a high standard. However, he came to a crossroads after failing to be drafted as a 14-year-old and had to decide whether to continue to strive to make it his career or focus on triathlon. He picked the latter and has grown into a star on the world stage.

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Mislawchuk was already running cross country and dabbling in triathlon as a way of boosting his fitness for ice hockey, and also to burn off his surplus energy – the reason his parents encouraged him into sports in the first place. His rise in the sport was a result of years of hard graft rather than meteoric. Indeed, it took him until the age of 25 to win a race, and he recalls spending most of his formative triathlon years not even being the fastest on his street in Canada and his parents being unhappy that he quit university after two years to focus on making swim-bike-run his job.

The journey was also beset by injury woes threatening to derail his career before it even began. He was racing at elite level by 2015, but on his World Cup debut broke a leg and four ribs in a bike crash. It set him back massively, but Mislawchuk wasn’t one to quit and fought back to fitness. However, in his first race back, and only his second at that level, he crashed again and broke his jaw.

For some, that may have been a sign to quit, but Mislawchuk was made of sterner stuff, and the strength he showed there was to forge the hugely impressive career he built thereafter. It doesn’t really get a tougher display of strength than finishing 15th in his first Olympics in Rio and then discovering he had been running on a broken leg but is another part of his remarkable story.

By 2018, Mislawchuk had established himself as a rising star and in 2019 secured two wins at World Cup level and podium finishes in the World Series. He marked out his threat at the Olympics by winning the Tokyo Test event with a quite brilliant performance. Two wins leading into the showdown in Tokyo cemented his reputation as a medal contender, but his second Olympic appearance would end in disappointment, yielding the same result as Rio and another 15th place.

Mislawchuk has been a Super League Triathlon regular from the start and picked up a podium finish in Singapore in 2019. Injuries and bad luck meant 2022 didn’t match up to his previous high standards, but he still bookended his Super League Championship campaign with a fourth in London and then fifth in the final round in NEOM.