INTRODUCTION: The mixed team triathlon relay first occured in the program of the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2021. National teams of 4 triathletes compete with every athlete running the super sprint distance (300 m swim, 7km cycle and 1,5 km run) in the Women / Men / Women / Men order. Until now, only one conference paper enlight this event (Pöller, 2015) on one event race. Recent developments on WTCS relays increase the number of events and offers the possibility to analyze more races. To determine which placements along the race lead to the podium, we investigated athletes time on every sequence of the races. As a result, it helps staffs optimizing the composition of their relay. METHODS: The dataset come from the World Triathlon database, range from 2009 to 2021 and contains 12 280 entries for a total of 38 races and 56 national teams. International races i.e. World Championships, the World Triathlon Series Championship relay, the continental Championship and the Major Events are included. Records were divided into 4 groups according to the final ranking of the teams: "Winner" (rank 1), "Medalists" (rank 2-3), "Finalist" (rank 4-8) and "Finisher" (rank 9 & +). A transition matrix based on three discrete-time Markov processes was used to estimate the probability of winning the race, finishing on the podium (TOP3) and finishing among the TOP 8. The probabilities are estimated at each stage end of the relay without taking transition times into account, (i.e. 12 stages, 3 per athlete). RESULTS: The results show an increase in the probabilitý of winning the race when triathletes rank first as the race progresses, starting at 28.9%. Similarly, for each group, the probabilities increase for triathlete that succeed at staying in their groups at the end of the race. For the Finisher group, we observe a strong decrease of the probability to be classified in the finalists, from the first triathlete, starting at 29,0%. We notice that the probability to win the race increases for the first three triathletes in the swim stage, ( 6,6% at SwimLeg1 vs 17,1% at the SwimLeg2). As well as an increase in the probability of being on the podium when staying in the Top 8 until the third relay, BikeLeg1 16,3% vs BikeLeg2 18,0%. CONCLUSION: These results highlight intrinsic specificities of the mixed triathlon relay. (i) the podium is not defined from the first relay but starting too far from the leading group condemns the team. (ii) Within a relay team, the first two triathletes seem to constitute a strategic role of placement while the last two triathletes are more likely to carry out solitary time trial type efforts. Time differences between positions, which are maintained at the beginning and then increase throughout the race, suggest that a drafting effect loss (swimming and cycling only) could lead to abrupt breaks in the probability of reaching a higher state. This study allows to optimize the order and the composition of the relays for the national staffs during the world level events.
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