TEMPE, Az. - The first national championship of the 2023-24 academic year is on the cusp as the Lenoir-Rhyne Women's Triathlon Team travels to the desert in search of back-to-back national titles.
The Bears enter the weekend as the No. 1 ranked program in Division II despite coming in second place in the East Regional back on Oct. 14.
LR will be led by three All-Region members including Sabrina Fleig, who recorded the best Division II time at the East Regional at 58:59.3. The sophomore has been the top LR finisher in all four events this season.
Eliska Rihova, who was also named to the All-Region Team, looks to climb the leaderboard again after a second-place result in the East Regional. Despite finishing two-tenths of a second behind Fleig, Rihova has progressed significantly throughout the course of the season.
At the ETSU Aquathlon, the sophomore settled for a seventh-place result, however, since that race, Rihova has recorded two top 10 times in the Giant Acorn race and East Regional.
In search for her first national championship will be Zoila Sicilia, who was named as the All-Region Freshman of the Year. The first-year student started her season off with a bang after posting the fifth-best time in the ETSU Aquathlon.
In her first competitive triathlon at Beaver Creek, Sicilia was unable to finish the event after a mishap in the bike portion. She would later get to complete her first collegiate triathlon in the Giant Acorn race, landing in the top 10 with a sixth-place result.
As Rihova and Fleig look to return to the top five from a year ago, Claudia Teran-Romagosa seeks for another top finish. The sophomore recorded a sixth-place result in the 2022 National Championship race with a time of 1:08:08.07.
Teran-Romagosa started off the 2023 season right where she left off with a third-place finish in the ETSU Aquathlon, but since then, she has not been able to crack into the Top 20 in her previous three events.
Another Top 10 finisher from last year's national championships include Nanette Nikolajsen, who finished ninth place with a time of 1:08:33.9. The senior finished with the fifth best LR triathlete time in the East Regional with a 1:01:45.3-result.
The race is scheduled to begin at 4:15 p.m. ET (2:15 p.m. MT) and is hosted by Arizona State University. This marks the third time in program history that the Bears are competing in Nationals after a first-place result in 2022 and a third-place result in 2021.
The event will be livestreamed from the Lenoir-Rhyne Women's Triathlon Instagram account (@lrutriathlon) and live results can be found on https://www.trisignup.com/Race/Results/135439#resultSetId-420035;perpage:100.
