It may go down in Ironman lore as second only to Julie Moss’s crawl over the finish line to second-place in Kona in 1982. With just 1,500 metres to go to what looked like a certain second-straight Ironman world championship win, Norway’s Solveig Lovseth stopped running. She staggered, teetering and tottering and losing her sense of direction. Her knees gave out, she got up, she lay down. Within a couple of minutes, Taylor Knibb trotted past Lovseth on the ground, toward a gold-medal finish in a time of 8:36:28.

Knibb’s victory came just one month after her fourth Ironman 70.3 world championship win in Nice – the first female pro to top the podium in both events since Switzerland’s Daniela Ryf in 2018.

Redemption from last year

For the 28-year-old American, it was a turn of the tables from last year, when she was forced by heat exhaustion to drop out of the race late in the run, allowing Lovseth to take the win. Lovseth, 27, was still down as Germany’s Laura Philipp, 39, ran past, clocking the fastest marathon of the race in 2:50:42 and rounding out her collection of one gold and two bronze World Championship medals with a silver one, with a finish time of 8:39:34. A world championship rookie, Switzerland’s Julie Derron, Knibb held her own throughout the race, coming out of the choppy water about a minute and a half behind Great Britain’s Lucy Charles-Barclay, the perennial swim leader.

On the bike, Knibb’s strength (a week after winning the 70.3 world championship in Nice on Sept. 13, she placed 13th in the ICU world championships time-trial race in Montreal), the American soon caught up to Charles-Barclay, and the pair battled it out, trading the lead five times over the first two-thirds of the course. Knibb pulled ahead decisively with about 50 kilometres to go on the bike, arriving at T2 with a three-minute lead. Lovseth, who had steadily moved up to third place on the bike course, came out of transition less than five minutes behind Knibb and began to close the gap, passing Charles-Barclay about 16 kilometres into the marathon. By the 28-kilometre mark – almost exactly the same spot where Charles-Barclay had dropped out of the race last year – the Briton once again stopped running and ended her race in the arms of her husband and training partner, while just up ahead, Knibb, too, was slowing down and struggling with gut issues. With eight kilometres still in the race, Lovseth ran past Knibb and into the lead.

Knibb on her race

“When Solveig came back, I was like, I can’t fight because if I fight, I’m going to lose,” Knibb said in a post-race interview. “I had to learn from last year: get to the finish line, get to the finish line, get to the finish line.”

The self-talk worked, propelling a stunned Knibb to victory. It worked for Lovseth, too, who managed to get back on her feet and walk to the finish line to spectators’ cheers. She finished the race in eighth position – good enough for second spot in the Pro Series standings. Knibb, who raced only one Ironman in 2026, placed seventh in the standings. Philipp’s silver medal propelled her to first place in the Pro Series, while Kat Matthews, who came fourth at Kona in 8:49:38, secured third place in the Pro Series.

“There were some awful moments out there, and there were some incredible moments,” said Knibb, admitting that had she come to Kona as a 12-year-old and seen herself out there, she would have been a fan. “It’s kind of what we all dream of.”

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