Overseas first for rising athlete

DESPITE recent top-spot successes in Queensland and Adelaide, triathlete Oscar Wootton is showing no signs of slowing down.

Later this year, he’ll represent Australia as one of two athletes competing in the Trinbago 2023 Commonwealth Youth Games held on the Caribbean island of Tobago.

Wootton said the event will be his most exciting yet.

“I’m really looking forward to the experience most of all. It’ll be my first time going overseas to race,” he said.

“I’ll really be able to enrich my skills against other countries. It’ll be awesome to understand how to race in different conditions as well since it’ll be quite hot and humid over there.”

Wootton qualified for Trinbago thanks to his wins during the national sprint championships at Port Adelaide in April, where he placed fifth in the 15-to-19-year-old, and first in the 2006-born junior B categories.

With each team featuring one male and one female athlete, Wootton will be competing alongside Queensland’s Aspen Anderson in the mixed relay triathlon.

With 400-metre swim, 10-kilometre bike ride, and four-kilometre run, he said the relay event will be different to a normal race.

“Two days later we’ll do our triathlon together where I’ll do the swim, run, bike ride, then she’ll go, then I’ll go, then she’ll finish it off,” he said.

“It’s going to be interesting because that’s not normally the format it’s done in. Normally it’d be a bigger group and we’d each relay once instead of back-to-back.

“It’s about half the distance of the solo triathlon. It’s something new and I’m excited to give it a go.”

Wootton’s trip will be about two-and-a-half weeks, beginning with a three-day pre-holding camp in Sydney before the games themselves at Tobago’s Buccoo Bay on Sunday 6 and Tuesday 8 August.

He spends roughly 24 hours a week training, dividing his time between the Ballarat Swimming Club, Ballarat Sebastopol Cycling Club, the RAD Centre, and with his running coach Neville Down.