Triathlete Archie in the national top 30

TALENTED athlete Archie Bordewich has sprinted across the 2023 triathlon season finishing line in the top thirty nationally.

The 18-year-old RGS student, who is now stepping back from the national endurance multi-sport series to focus on his A-levels, can look back on a year of high-level achievements.

He qualified for the top level national Junior Super Series when he was just 17 years old, following a rigorous performance assessment weekend at the University of Nottingham.

Archie, from Burton Leonard, went on to compete against athletes up to age 19 and raced as part of the Yorkshire Triathlon Academy, which involved around 15 hours of training every week.

Throughout the year, he took part in triathlons, duathlons and aquathlons across Wales, England and Scotland, competing against elite athletes, including university triathlon teams and Commonwealth Games medal winners.

He finished the season 29th in the national Junior Open category, with his best result coming eighth in the Northern Aquathlon, a swim-run event in open water, held at Lochore Meadows in Scotland.

The keen RGS and Ripon rugby player, who hopes to study medicine at university, explained: “To compete at national level over the past couple of years has required about 15 hours of training per week. Getting up at 4:30am two or three mornings a week to do two hours of swimming before school was sometimes hard to balance with staying alert in class!”

Studying maths, chemistry and biology at A-level, he first took up triathlon at the age of nine, when living in New Zealand, where he took part in the largest children’s triathlon in the world.

Although he has represented Yorkshire in the national finals for cross country running several times in recent years, he has always preferred swimming, which he intends to keep up.