In 2023 we had 1,053 aquabike races taking place worldwide. That´s 16%  more races than in 2022. The majority of races – not very surprising – took place in the United States, with a total number of 648 races (82 more than in 2022). In the first part of our season review I mentioned that aquabike racing is still growing in the UK. Unfortunately this did not apply to the number of races in 2023. After 127 races in 2022 we had 5 races less last year. However, despite having less races to choose from the number of GB athletes who finished an aquabike races still grew by 5.7% compared to 2022. The dropping number of races in the UK was the big exception though.

In Canada we had 76 aquabike races – 12 more than the year before.  The biggest rise we had in Australia from 42 races in 2022 to no less than 76 races in 2023. This big raise was mainly due to the fact that quite a few Aussie triathlon clubs included aquabike options in their regular club races. But with most of the big Downunder triathlon events (including Ironman and Challenge Family events) hosting qualifiers for the 2024 world´s in Townsville, we had also many new big races with rather big fields of competing aquabike athletes. We´ll see if those events will continue hosting aquabike events over the next few years.

We had 25 aquabike races in New Zealand (+1), 23 in Spain (+8) and 16 in Austria (+1). There was also quite some progress to see in Germany. While the first aquabike race in Germany wasn´t before 2022, the number of races grew to 11 in 2023.

With 5112 men and 3859 women a total number of 8971 athletes finished an aquabike race last year. That´s 21% more than in 2022 – a year that already showed a big growth to previous years.

In 2022 athletes from 39 different countries finished an aquabike race while in 2023 aquabikers came from no less than 50 different countries. Despite the number of countries to host at least one aquabike race was growing from 27 to 30 this means that there were athletes from 20 countries competing which have no chance to do so in their home country.

The biggest number of athletes obviously again came from the United States with 3995 aquabikers, followed by the UK (1351 athletes), Australia (770 athletes), Canada (559 athletes) and Spain (456 athletes). In last year´s preview I mentioned that the US are the country with the biggest share of female athletes which was a mistake. While the share of male and female athletes in the States is pretty much exactly 50/50, we have a clear majority of female aquabike athletes in Canada. In 2023 57% of Canadian athletes who finished an aquabike race were women.

Overall, we had no less than 12,326 race finishes. That´s a plus of almost 30% compared to 2022, showing that not only more athletes competed in aquabike races, but also the number of athletes who competed in more than one race grew significantly last year.

The standard distance races are still the most popular with a total of 4894 race finishes, followed by sprint (3454) and middle distance (3413). With 565 race finishes in long distance aquabike races that number was more than four times bigger than in 2022. Of course, a huge part of this is due to the fact that the 2022 long distance world´s was carried out over middle distance. But we also had growing numbers of competing aquabike athletes in other long-distance races.

In the third part of our 2023 season review we will take a closer look at the most active and most successful athletes of the past aquabike racing season. Stay tuned!