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inSync: A Singapore Performance, a Western Sydney Win, and a Sync Sweep
- Martin Ulloa
- 8 hours ago
- 4 min read
Two performances inside a fortnight tell you a lot about where an athlete sits in their build. A standout day at T100 Singapore against one of the deepest non-drafting fields on the calendar, then a 70.3 win at Western Sydney on home soil. Jake Birtwhistle has stepped into the long-course conversation, and the way he is racing right now is no accident.
It is also part of a bigger story for the Sync athlete program: Western Sydney was a doubleheader weekend, with Natalie Van Coevorden taking the women’s title alongside Jake’s win in the men’s. Two athletes, two podium tops, one race — a result we are proud of and one that is worth taking a closer look at.
From Short-Course Speed to the Long Game
Jake’s pedigree is well known. Years at the sharp end of WTCS racing built a runner most long-course athletes never quite catch, and a swim/bike pack-skill set that translates into uncommon composure when the racing turns nervous. The question for any short-course athlete moving into non-drafting and 70.3/T100 racing is never about the engine. It is about whether the position they are racing in can hold for two hours alone in the wind, instead of forty-five minutes in a pack.
That is a different problem. Draft-legal racing rewards a position you can drop in and out of, with frequent surges, recovery in the wheels, and short blocks of solo effort. Non-drafting rewards a position you can settle into and not move out of — sustainable, powerful, and aerodynamically honest under conditions you cannot hide from. The bridge between the two is the bike fit, and that is where the work has been.
Singapore: Racing in the Heat
T100 Singapore is one of the hardest days on the calendar in any year. Heat and humidity stress every system on the bike before the run even starts, and the field has the depth to punish anyone who arrives a touch off. Jake’s race showed the ride of a long-course athlete now rather than a short-course athlete trying his hand: paced, composed, and still fast enough off the bike to run with the leaders.
What stood out to us watching was the consistency of his position over the duration of the bike. The body language of an athlete who is fighting their setup looks different from the body language of an athlete who is at home in it. Jake looked at home.
Western Sydney: A Win, and a Sync Doubleheader
A fortnight later in Western Sydney, the result was the breakthrough. Jake won the men’s 70.3 in front of a home crowd, building from a strong swim, riding solo at the front for long stretches of the bike, and bringing it home with the run leg that has always been his trademark.
On the women’s side, Natalie Van Coevorden made it a clean Sync sweep, taking the women’s title in the same race. Two of our athletes, both winning their fields, on the same day, on the same course. From a brand and program perspective, these days are rare, and they are the strongest argument we can offer for the work that goes into each athlete individually.
"Producing a win comes with so many small processes along the way and on the weekend I felt like I executed a lot of them. Being at the front of the race and racing to what I know I am capable of, makes me happy that I could show what we are producing behind the scenes." - NVC
Both wins were grounded in setups dialed for the rider, not borrowed from a catalog. That, more than any single piece of equipment, is what we want the result to point at.
Jake's Build: BMC, Princeton, Sync AB03
The chassis is a BMC TT, paired with Princeton CarbonWorks wheels and the new Sync AB03 cockpit. The combination is built around a clear principle: the cockpit is the variable that ties the position together, and the position is the variable that decides whether the rest of the build is paying off.
The AB03 was developed to give athletes a wider, more honest range of position adjustment than most stock cockpits allow — pad stack and reach that can be moved in finer increments, extension geometry that supports a high-hands position without forcing it, and a structure that holds its setting under race-day load. For an athlete in transition from a short-course position to a sustainable long-course one, that tunability is not a luxury. It is the mechanism that lets the fit evolve as the athlete evolves.
Numbers are not the story here. Different athletes will get different gains from the same components, and that is the whole point: a build is fast when it fits the rider, and slow when it is forced on one. Jake’s setup works because it was built around him, not around a marketing claim.
The Back Half of 2026
The season ahead points toward IM 70.3 Worlds in Nice in September, and a calendar of T100 stops on the way there. Nice is a different course problem to Western Sydney — more climbing, more time off the bars, more demand on a position that has to remain comfortable when the road goes vertical — and it will be the next interesting test of how the build holds up under varied terrain.
We want to congratulate both Jake and Nat on some great racing and wish them the best for the rest of the season!
