In 2022 we had 871 aquabike races taking place worldwide. The biggest number – not very surprising – in the United States, with a total number of 542 races (83 more than in 2021). We had 127 races in the UK (+22), 61 in Canada (+48), 42 in Australia (+13), 24 in New Zealand (+8) and 15 in Spain (+10). As pleasant as those growing numbers are you should keep in mind that in 2021 the racing season still was a bit shortened due to covid restrictions. This is especially the case in Canada where the 2021 racing season started pretty late.

A total number of 7365 athletes finished an aquabike race. That´s 34% more than in 2021. The share of participating men and women didn´t change much. With 55,8% male aquabike finishers we had a slight shift towards the male side here (55,6 % in 2021). The explanation is probably that we had quite a few new aquabike races in countries where the share of male aquabikers is much bigger in general, which is especially the case in southern and eastern Europe. In the following chart you can see the different distribution in agegroup of male and female athletes.

While female athletes set the majority in the younger age groups, men clearly outnomber women in aquabike races in all 55+ agegroups. You can also see that aquabike is most popular for men between 55 and 65 – an age where many of us still exercise different sports very actively, but find it hard to go for longer runs or suffer from knee or hip injuries.

The biggest number of athletes – also not very surprising – comes from the US with 3549 aquabikers, followed by the UK (1284 athletes), Australia (487 athletes), Canada (422 athletes) and Spain (379 athletes). The United States are also the country with the biggest share of female aquabike athletes. In fact, it´s the only country where women are the majority in aquabike races. Not a vast majority though. With 1775 female athletes finishing an aquabike race in the United States, they outnumbered their male competitors by one single athlete.

Overall, we had 9519 race finishes, showing that most athletes only competed in one or two races and only a relatively small number of athletes in three or more races last year. Most popular are the standard distance races with a total of 3956 race finishes, followed by sprint (2807) and middle distance (2637). Only 119 athletes finished a long distance aquabike race in in 2022. There aren´t really a lot of long-distance races out there. And after the Long Distance Aqubabike World Championships happened to be a middle distance race, there wasn´t really a big race in this category.

While we had 386 sprint distance races (254 of them in the US) and 339 standard distance races (224 of them in the US), there were also 130 middle distance races (57 in the US), but only 16 long distance races worldwide. It´s interesting to see that for middle and long distance races the majority of races is already outside of the United States. But there are still only very view sprint and standard distance events in Europe, which offer an aquabike option for their triathlon races.

So let´s hope those numbers will increase a little more during the 2023 season!