Taylor Knibb
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_Paris2024.jpg) Knibb in 2024 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Nationality | American | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Born | February 14, 1998 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Sport | Triathlon | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Medal record
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Taylor Knibb (born February 14, 1998) is an American triathlete and the 2022 and 2023 and 2024 Women's Ironman 70.3 World Champion.[1][2] She competed in the women's event at the 2020 Summer Olympics, held in Tokyo in 2021, finishing sixteenth.[3] Later that same Olympics, she won a silver medal in the mixed relay event.[4] Knibb is the youngest woman ever to qualify for the US Olympic triathlon team.[5][6] Knibb qualified for two sports at the 2024 Summer Olympics, triathlon and the cycling time trial.[7] Knibb also competes in the middle distance triathlon race series, T100 Triathlon.
Knibb began participating in triathlons at age 11, inspired by watching her mother, Leslie Knibb, compete in the Ironman triathlon. At age 15, she began competing on the youth and junior elite circuit.[8] At Sidwell Friends School for high school, she participated in swim and cross country, while continuing to compete in triathlon. In 2014 and 2015 she was named both the Washington D.C. Gatorade Cross Country Runner of the Year and the D.C. State Athletic Association Runner of the Year.[citation needed]
Following in the footsteps of many of her family members, she attended Cornell, where she ran NCAA track and cross country for four years, and competed on the swim team her senior year. She graduated in 2020.[9]
Her role models include her mother, Tamara Gorman and Gwen Jorgensen.[8]
She joined the national triathlon team in 2017, and as of 2021 remained the youngest athlete on the team.[10]
Career
In her junior career, she won the USA Triathlon Junior National Championship in 2015 and 2016, the Junior World Championships in 2016 and 2017, and the U23 World Championships in 2018. At the 2017 ITU World Triathlon Series in Edmonton she finished second to become the youngest woman to podium in the series.[11]
Knibb earned her spot on the US Olympic team [12] after she won gold in the season opener of the 2021 World Triathlon Championship Series, held on May 15, 2021, in Yokohama, Japan.[5]
In 2021 Knibb won the PTO Collins Cup along with a series of podiums and wins at Boulder 70.3, that burst her onto the world scene.[13]
In 2022 Knibb Won the Oceanside Ironman 70.3 [14] and broke the course record. This was the start of a great series of long course events for the season. In October 2022 Knibb won the Women's Ironman 70.3 World Championship, held in St George, Utah, becoming the youngest woman to win the race.[15] One year later, Knibb successfully defended the title. Taylor crossed the line 1st in the 2024 Ironman 70.3 World Championship in Taupo, NZ with a , for a final time of 03:57:34, marking it her 3rd consecutive Ironman 70.3 world title.[citation needed]
Knibb made her Ironman World Championships debut in 2023, finishing in fourth place.[16] At the Paris Test Event in August 2023, Knibb placed fifth, qualifying her to compete in Triathlon for team USA at the 2024 Summer Olympics.[17] In May 2024, she won the Time Trial at the USA Cycling National Road Championships, qualifying her for the Time Trial cycling event Paris 2024 and making her a rare dual-sport Olympian.[7] She finished nineteenth in the event, after crashing four times in the rainy conditions.[18] For the triathlon events, she finished nineteenth in the women's event before anchoring the US team to a repeat silver medal in the mixed relay.[19] Knibb was the second Cornell alumnus to win a medal in the 2024 Olympics, following Michael Grady's gold medal with the U.S. men's four rowing team.[20]
As of 2024 Taylor Knibb had won three out of the three races she has competed in in the PTO's T100 World Tour. She won in San Francisco, Ibiza and Las Vegas.[citation needed]
